#gukvory

Jeongguk guesses that it is nearing one in the morning when his phone buzzes four times in succession. The vibrations occur no more than a few seconds apart against his balls, which is where the device has slipped down to nestle over the course of the past eight minutes.

He knows he should probably reach between his thighs and retrieve it to check the slew of texts that tickle his dick through a pair of grey sweatpants. He is also ninety-nine percent positive that he knows precisely who the sender is. But the military bomb payload is that fucking close to being at the Deadlock Gang’s cave hideout, just having passed Checkpoint B, and Jeongguk is quite possibly playing his best Escort game since he planted his sweet ass on the living room couch. The four instant ramyeon packets that he inhaled at eight o’clock are still burning off in his system. Well-needed fuel for a long, uninterrupted night of Overwatch.

Well, the chances of that peaceful gaming occurring were narrowed to considerably slim once a certain someone had slipped out of her bedroom and announced she was going out for cocktails. She had managed to breeze through the front door before Jeongguk could really have enough of an opportunity to stare at her magnificent ass in those jeans. But if his calculations were correct, he has made it through a solid five hours of tranquility so far.

When he sees the attacking team’s Lucio put up a sound barrier, Jeongguk cannot help but blast a grin of victory. He unleashes his McCree’s deadeye, obliterating the entire team. There is a triumphant shout that is echoed amongst his own teammates, and he nearly throws his goddamn PS4 controller at the television when he fist-pumps the air out of excitement. Through the headset, Yugyeom makes a comment amongst his hooting along the lines of: “McCree, that OP motherfucker!” while Jeongguk spams McCree’s: “I’m the quick, you’re the dead,” voice line over and over in the final seconds that the payload reaches its destination and the game comes to a close.

Earning play of the game was expected after the shit he pulled last minute. Though Jeongguk finds himself surprised when he gets ten votes out of the twelve players, considering the opposing team is currently shouting a stream of insults. Because yeah, McCree is overpowered as fuck. But the sheer laziness in him cannot bear the thought of having to train up on a different hero, at this stage.

“I’m out,” Jeongguk announces to Yugyeom as he reaches down to grab his phone, beginning to vibrate against his balls again due to his lack of response. Yugyeom laughs, the connection slightly static.

“Gotta get your girlfriend, huh?“

“Fuck you, not my girlfriend,” Jeongguk barks before exiting the main screen, albeit with a tiny smile, and then shifts his headset to sit around his neck. When he clicks the home button of his phone, he is greeted by a screen lit up with eight notifications, confirming two things.

It is definitely past one in the morning, and it is definitely who he was expecting to be.

Jeongguk gets his heart stuck in his throat, bites his tongue and stupidly grins at the last text that was sent, chest tight at the thought of her missing him. He can picture that dumbass drunk smile of her’s so clearly; a sight that he has seen enough times to have it burned into the very cells of his brain. It is the one thing that is beyond fucking adorable when paired with her glassy eyes, staring roundly at him while she perches that amazing ass on his lap. Right on the zipper of his jeans so that the jagged metal presses right against his dick and– Fuck, too far.

He chances a glance at his sweatpants and yeah, shit, he is a little bit hard now. Jeongguk slaps himself, firm enough to properly wake up from his unexpectedly lascivious daze, and then he quickly punches in his passcode.

He sputters and incredulously shakes his head, running a hand through his hair because hell yeah, she is a twelve alright. More than that even, a hundred in his books, if numbers had to define her. Maybe Jeongguk should not think such thoughts about his best friend of seven years slash university flatmate of two. But then again, her attractiveness is common knowledge amongst their friends and all those alike who encounter her. As clear as the sky is blue and the grass is green. Simply, Jeongguk is just confirming the obvious and nothing more than that.

Yeah, definitely nothing more than that. Totally still not semi-hard over the thought of her drunk smile, of all the boner-inducing things about her.

Before he can text her back, the theme song to Legend of Zelda is filtering through the living room and the ugliest photo he has of her is appearing blown up on the screen. The image is one that is zoomed right in on her face from where she breaches the ocean, pixelated by the added effect of it being a screenshot. The fast motion of her coming up after a wave had crushed her makes it appear as though her face is being dragged down by gravity; mouth parted in a gasp; completely wet hair plastered to her scalp, and presented at such an angle that she looks bald. 

It is fucking hideous. Jeongguk had laughed so hard that he peed himself a little the first time he noticed it in one of the snapshots that he had taken on his DLSR at the beach that day, and he never let her live it down. But they did come to a mutual agreement to not allow such a monstrosity to be released to the general public on an unfortunate Facebook birthday post, or as a tactic for revenge. Otherwise, Jeongguk would similarly be having a picture of himself exposed as far as the eye can see. The one where he is slumped backwards over their coffee table, blacked out and wearing nothing but a pair of her pretty pink panties, the tip of his sad and soft dick poking out the leg hole.

Jeongguk stares at the caller ID photo a moment longer, eyes watering with hilarity before he swipes his finger across the screen to answer with, “Well, well, if it isn’t–“

“Th–The sexiest motherfucker you know?” slurs through the other end of the line, nearly drowned out by the commotion she most likely sits cross-eyed within. “Who s’about to be joined by a much less sexy motherfucker, hmm?”

“Let me guess,” Jeongguk runs his tongue over his teeth, unhooking the headset from his neck and placing it on the coffee table, “I’m the less sexy motherfucker?” he says as he reaches for the remote to turn off the television.

“Ding ding, ten points to Gryffindor,” she whoops and giggles, and god, Jeongguk melts a little as he stands up but definitely not because he thinks her intoxicated laughter sounds fucking adorable. No way. “Y’gonna come collect the goods?”

He stuffs his feet into a battered pair of Vans and reaches for his black parka, looking like a damn slob and all with nothing but a dark shirt and his grey sweats underneath. He has no plans to stay longer than absolutely necessary at the bar, anyway. “I can’t think of any goods I need to collect,” Jeongguk sighs, swiping his house keys and wallet from the dish atop the entry cabinet and making way towards the front door. “A drunken mess that unfortunately so happens to be my best friend sounds more accurate.”

“At leas’ she’s got a great ass!” she defends herself, Jeongguk mentally agrees, then literally has to slap himself across the face again for focusing too long on the mental image of it, which he has copied in high-definition into his memory. Her voice becomes distant from the speaker, shouts out, “No you may not touch it, fuckin’ perv! Go piss in yo’ girly fuckin’ Cosmopolitan, yeah?!”

“Please don’t get yourself killed before I get there,” Jeongguk raises his voice a little in hopes of her hearing over the music. A smidgen of the tension that is suddenly squeezing at his chest is released when he hears her indignant huff right against the speaker. “I’m gonna be pissed if I walk all that way just to find you’re dead.”

“It’s like, one kilometre tops, pussy,” she retorts, the eye roll practically audible as Jeongguk locks the front door and then heads down the hallway to the elevator. “A light jog’ll get you here in what, five minutes. So start runnin’, boy.”

“Fuck no. I’m hanging up. Stay alive.” He mutters, punching repeatedly at the elevator button as if it will make the doors open faster. 

Distantly, he wonders why he is in such a goddamn rush. He narrows it down to just wanting to get back home again as soon as humanly possible; to return to his disturbed Overwatch marathon. Yeah, of course that is why.

“Thanks babe, you th’ best!” she sings, hangs up before he can, and Jeongguk jams his finger against the button with a greater ferocity until the elevator dings open after what feels to be centuries of waiting. (It was not even thirty seconds.)

He ends up speedily jogging the entire way to the bar to build up his blood circulation because it is cold as tits outside, of course. Definitely not because it means he will get to see her sooner, make sure she is safe and sound and not being leered at by some drunken, creepy lecher.

Nope. No way at all.

They say that there is always a silver lining to every unfortunate and downright dreadful situation. Jeongguk is currently wondering where the fuck such lining happens to be once he finally finds a particular girl that he was forced and threatened to brave the cold in order to collect, only to be met by the pout that she knows gets him all pliable and willing. He does not know it yet, but the silver lining is still coming. Slowly, gradually, but it will.

Even if, right now, that shit seems as likely as getting a blow job from Beyonce.

“How much?” he shouts to be heard over the pounding music, repeats for the second time because he refuses to believe the sum that the bartender first announced. 

At Jeongguk’s hip slouches the self-proclaimed goods. The treacherous best friend, who keeps having to be hiked up by his arm curled tightly around her waist since her bones liquefied by liquor are failing to keep her standing. She has that goofy smile pulling at her plush lips, and Jeongguk is torn between wanting to slap from her face, or to kiss it away instead.

The bartender checks the amount again, then leans towards Jeongguk with a somewhat empathetic expression to call back, “Rounded to one hundred and eighty-four dollars.”

On the inside, Jeongguk might be crying a little. Funny how the reason behind his internal agony is also the same thing that is keeping him slightly sane through his mental calculations of how much money he has left in his bank account. Pressed against his side with an intoxicated, unfocused gaze that stares up at him too endearingly for him to be one hundred percent angry. He is at ninety-nine point nine-nine percent. Okay, maybe on the cusp of no less than ninety percent. Goddamn.

“I’m letting you go for a second,” Jeongguk warns her and begins to slowly recede his arm, giving her enough time to support herself on the bar. Rather than doing this, she wraps her own arms around his waist and nestles under his armpit.

In any other situation than the apparent one, where he has to aid his best friend’s spontaneous cocktail night with his own miserable funds, Jeongguk would be fighting to tame the glee. The kind that would be demanding to tuck her closer, and perhaps press his nose to the crown of her head so he can breathe in the soft scent of her vanilla shampoo. Unfortunately, no matter how much he wills himself to be dreaming that his weekly budget is about to be kicked repeatedly in the balls and that maybe, instead, they are just at home on the couch and it is one of those movie nights where she gets extra cuddly for no apparent reason, Jeongguk is still stuck in the apparent situation.

He glares at his tormenter, who continues to latch like a lock around his body, and barely manages to keep his tears from falling as he retrieves his wallet and flips it open, fingers shaky. An extra tug is required from the bartender to loosen the measly grip Jeongguk’s fingertips have on his debit card when he hands it over.

“Girlfriend?” The bartender politely chips in as he swipes the card through the eftpos machine and then faces the keypad towards Jeongguk. As Jeongguk punches in the pin number, the bartender darts his gaze up to him with a raised eyebrow. “Ex-girlfriend?”

“Neither, and I don’t know if that makes it better or worse,” Jeongguk smiles, the kind that conveys his immense internal suffering. The bartender gives a sympathetic nod and hands back Jeongguk’s card before rushing off to continue serving drinks.

The latest, monstrous attachment on Jeongguk’s side squeezes him with her feeble, jelly-drunk arms. Albeit the situation, something softens inside of him when he grabs her chin so that she will properly face him. She blinks languidly like an overtired kitten, mascara smudged beneath her eyes, lipstick smeared a little on her chin. Not in the way that suggests somebody else had their mouth on her own. It is definitely the familiar mark caused by the back of her hand rubbing against her lips after taking a shot. Jeongguk is still weighing up whether he prefers the latter to the former.

“‘m tired, Jeonggukie,” she whines, slumps closer to him, and he wraps his arm around her waist again, hoisting her up with a displeased sound.

“All that talk about wanting me to have a drink with you, and now you’re making me pay the bill and run?” Jeongguk teasingly chides, and she unabashedly nods against his right pectoral. Alarm bells start ringing in his head when her weight against his side grows a tad too close to the ‘falling unconscious’ side of the spectrum. “Woah, hey– No. Don’t you dare fall asleep on me, ___. You still have to walk home.”

She hooks her chin on his shoulder and conjures that goofy, heart-melting grin that has Jeongguk crying a little on the inside, because he is such an absolute sucker for her. In that moment, her pout becomes the bane of his existence as she says, “Jus’ carry me, yeah?”

“Hell fucking no.”

Jeongguk carries her on his back the entire damn way.

By the time they reach the front door of their apartment, Jeongguk’s knees are weakly trembling and he feels utterly winded. Maybe it is a sign that he needs to get back into the gym on the weekends instead of indulging Yugyeom with Overwatch marathons. Or, more favourably, he needs to find a new best friend who will not 1. have him pay for her expensive, alcoholic ways, and then 2. make him piggyback her through the bitter cold night while she is practically deadweight against his shoulders in her partially asleep state.

“For someone who was calling me a pussy because I couldn’t be bothered walking to the bar, you’re awfully hypocritical in riding my back the whole way home,” Jeongguk says, gasping a little, jiggling the key in the lock and bustling them both inside once the latch clicks.

She clambers off his back, staggers slightly, and then catches herself on the back of the couch. Miraculously, she appears minutely more sober than she was twenty minutes ago. “Could’ve got an Uber.”

Jeongguk kicks off his shoes. “What, and paid him with the moths flying out of my wallet?”

She shrugs. “It would’ve cos’ like, three dollars.”

“That three dollars is lasting us until next Thursday, thanks to a certain someone who just made me blow my pay that I only got four days ago,” he hisses, sliding out of his jacket and hanging it over one of the dining table chairs.

And there it is again. That silly little grin tugging softly at her lips as she wiggles her hips against the couch. Strategically, Jeongguk briskly turns on his heel and strides into the kitchen before she can get her nails in him. Moulding him like the pathetic putty that he is. He can practically hear her pout when he ignores her blatant attempt at melting down his cold facade. Then, her heels unsteadily click across the vinyl flooring to watch him pull out a saucepan and fill it halfway with water, positioning it on the largest hotplate.

Jeongguk does not cast his eyes her way, even if every inch of his body, particularly his dick, is demanding that he do so. Because holy eight-pound six-ounce sweet baby Jesus in his cradle of hay, he did not notice in the dim lighting of the bar, but she is wearing a black v-cut sweater that exposes her shoulders and collarbones and a barely there shadow of cleavage. That, in itself, is saying something since her tits are a size that would fit neatly in his palms without any overflow. Just a nice, small and cute handful. God, he has never seen her with even a hint of cleavage like this before. This is unchartered territory that he has no idea of how to face, especially when he can barely cope with the sight of her amazing ass in any kind of legwear.

Jeongguk, staring blankly at the packet ramyeon in his hands, mentally forces himself not to get fucking hard like a teenage boy in the middle of their goddamn kitchen.

“What’cha doin’, good lookin’?” she hums, now perched on a breakfast bar stool with the side of her face mashed into the heel of her palm, elbow propped up on the kitchen counter. In his periphery, those small, adorable breasts spill from the v-neck onto the white laminate as a result of her slouched over position. Every single one of his nerve-endings is aflame.

Jeongguk releases the air trapped tightly in his lungs and then proceeds to make way towards the slowly simmering pot of water. He dares not a single glance at her, for the fabric of his sweatpants leaves little to the imagination, and she has definitely recognised a semi in them before.

“I’m making you something to eat since you always get hungry after drinking. Also, because I’m the greatest best friend that this world could’ve ever graced you with.” Jeongguk’s eyes are glued to his hands as he begins tearing into the packets. He dumps the dehydrated noodles and seasonings into the water, and desperately tries not to think about how sweet her tits would look in his hands. Praying that she takes the bait, he adds on as an afterthought, “Why don’t you get changed into something comfortable, and the food will be ready when you are?”

There is a pause, a moment where Jeongguk’s tongue pulses like a heart in his mouth, and he tries not to break into a nervous sweat. He can practically hear his own words clicking into place in her mind; connecting, disconnecting, reconnecting; fumbling through the drunken haze that still lays thick on her thought process. Twenty seconds pass, and he ends up so on edge that when she slaps her open palm against the countertop, he startles so abruptly that he rips open a seasoning packet with the ferocity of a gorilla. Beef flavouring bursts over his shirt and the stovetop in a cloud of brown dust.

“I shall go do that,” she announces. Jeongguk, going from nearly hyperventilating out of surprise to having a coughing fit from inhaling seasoning particles, sees her slither like a lizard off the stool out of his watering periphery. Except drunk, and with a goddamn, freshly fucking harvested cleavage.

He only lets a tear roll down his cheek once she has staggered down the hallway. This is Jeon Jeongguk, at the ripe age of twenty-three, accepting that he may die tonight.

Despite this possibility, he goes about cleaning up the spilled beef flavouring, saving as much of it as he can and depositing it in the simmering pot. The ramyeon-making itself goes rather smoothly. He manages to not spill the boiling water all over himself, nor accidentally rub his eyes after touching the chilli sauce like he did that one, hellish time that rendered him blind for just under three hours. He stirs the noodle broth and listens to her clomp around her bedroom, the occasional grunt and groan emitting when she cracks her hip against her desk, or whacks her shoulder against the frame of her walk-in closet.

She remerges in an acceptably less boner-inducing outfit. Consisting of one of his black hoodies that nearly reaches her knees, and assumedly (he prays, at least) a pair of unseeable boyshorts underneath. Jeongguk starts straining the ramyeon into a bowl.

“That’s mine,” he says about the hoodie while she clambers back onto the stool, looking soft and cuddly in her bundle of cotton and fleece. Her attire may not be as threatening to his vulnerable dick, but it is definitely as murderous to his weakened heart.

“Finders keepers, losers are weepers,” she immediately fires back, settling into her previous palm-smushed-against-face position, waiting for him to finish plating up the ramyeon. “Dun’ forget the cheese, either.”

At that, his whole body shudders with repulsion. For the first time since the growth of her cleavage was made apparent, Jeongguk faces her directly and hopes that the sheer suffering she puts him through is perfectly translated through his withered expression when he says, “You are disgusting,” before opening the fridge anyway and retrieving the container of pre-sliced easy-melt. “I will never understand how you can perform such sacrilege against the two holiest foods by combining them into the edible-equivalent of Hell.”

“Excuse you, cheesy ramyeon is the best gift this world has given us.” She frowns at the ceiling, thinks this over for a moment, and then corrects herself with, “Has given me, since I’m the best gift this world has ever given you.”

Jeongguk merely chuckles, does not deny it, because one may call him a deadset liar if he were to do so. Instead, he peels two slices of cheese out of the container and places them atop the bowl of steaming ramyeon, pressing them down with a fork so that they melt faster. 

She makes an iffy little sound, somewhat of a whine, and says, “Extra cheese, please!”

“You’ll make yourself feel sick,” he warns, yet all she does is glare adorably at him until he caves like the weak man that he is and adds an extra two squares. A thought itches at the back of his mind, informing him that he is most likely going to regret this, and he brushes it away just as quickly as it forms. Under that beguiling gaze of hers, she could ask Jeongguk to stick chopsticks up his ass and impersonate a popsicle and he would.

An over-exaggeration, but you get the point.

“Alright, one extra cheesy ramyeon for the drunk girl with disgusting taste in food,” Jeongguk declares, reaching across the counter to place the dairy-laden bowl in front of her before grabbing her hand, putting the fork in her open palm and forcibly curling her fingers around it with his own. He holds her hand a moment longer than necessary between his own, grinning tightly, remaining to ignore the voice that is now screeching in his head that feeding her this is a very, very bad idea. “Bon appétit,” he finalises, and the deal is done.

She smiles up at him, eyes shining and all of her teeth on display. Jeongguk wonders what wars he must have ended in his past life to be rewarded with this girl of starlight and vanilla and honey who winds around him, softens him into warm and easy. Before he can further dwell on such a tender thought, she shovels a grotesque forkful of cheesy ramyeon into her mouth.

“Tfhanksh Jeonguffie,” she says around the stickiness, and Jeongguk, now the perfect picture of nonchalance, wordlessly turns on his heel and begins to clean up the dishes. Anything, really, to distract himself from projecting the small amount of vomit that has lurched up to the back of his throat at the horrendous meal making contact with those lips that deserve so much better.

Minutes slowly go by, stretching past two in the morning and beginning to progress towards quarter-past. Besides the sickening slurps that she makes behind him, and the clattering of the saucepan with a handful of dirty dishes from his own dinner being washed in the sink, no conversation is made, and it is comfortable. These moments are precisely why Jeongguk has not risked it yet; asking her the big question; the determiner as to whether their best friendship will advance into something more. If she were to deny him, he believes he would be able to handle it, but he knows well that such knowledge would be on her mind every time she looks his way. The awkward tension would ensue, she would overanalyse his every move, and he would become distant because he does not want her to get the wrong idea. They would anticipate the day that the lease on their apartment runs out so they can go their separate ways as soon as possible.

So, he keeps quiet and basks in the contentment that they have created together in their little home. At the end of the day, she is his best friend, and he could not imagine a future without her in it. No matter if they were romantically involved, or purely platonic. Sure, he would love to kiss her collarbones and put his hands on her hips and maybe – just maybe – tell her that he loves her in the morning glow of a lazy Sunday, whispered across the pillowcases. But he can live without that. He can be a big boy about it and move on.

He keeps telling himself this, at least. Soon, he will genuinely be convinced that he can do it.

“Jeongguk.”

“Mmm,” he hums in response, turning around when her follow-up is delayed, and he instantly notices how her expression has suddenly transformed.

Honestly, Usain Bolt could not even compare to how fast his ass moves. Jeongguk skirts around the kitchen counter, pulls her off the stool, and hastily guides her towards the sink while cursing under his breath.

“I feel…” she mumbles as Jeongguk takes out the plug and then gathers her hair up as well as he can manage, holding it in a loose bun at the crown of her head and cringing when her torso slightly convulses. “Like I’m gonna– Ugh–“

“Oh my god.”

Jeongguk swears he did not make her that much cheesy ramyeon. But dear fucking lord, the sheer amount that comes up and splashes into the sink is simply horrifying. The noodles must have expanded in her stomach for such an extensive volume to now be regurgitated in disgusting, yellow chunks that make his own stomach turn with wooziness. He cannot believe he thought cheesy ramyeon looked bad in the bowl, because it is appearing to be at least ten times worse in the form of barf.

“You owe me– Ugh, christ– So big after tonight, you little shit,” Jeongguk grunts at her between clenched teeth and gags when he gets a whiff of the stench. Like over-fermented dairy left out in the sun for weeks, doused in a hefty helping of vodka.

The sound she makes is awful when the next heave is unleashed onto the stainless steel, and she reaches one hand back from where it is braced on the counter to weakly pat his stomach. When she shakily murmurs, “I’ll give you the best blow of your life as thanks,” Jeongguk has to bite the wet, fleshy inner of his cheek to stop the visualisation of her words from drowning his mind until it is all he can think about.

“Don’t talk about sucking my dick while you’re vomiting,” he groans with a small tilt to the corners of his lips despite himself, collecting a loose strand of hair that is falling dangerously close to her mouth. She halfheartedly laughs before another surge of cheesy ramyeon makes its departure from her body, and Jeongguk dry-heaves in perfect synchronisation.

By the time the contents of her belly have been completely and utterly expelled, Jeongguk is admittedly feeling much weaker in the stomach than he was before her bout of throwing up. Especially after having to wash it down the drain. Once there is not an inch of cheesy noodles in sight, he gingerly carries her bridal-style into their shared bathroom and props her up on the sink, one hand on her waist to keep her steady and the other reaching for her toothbrush. 

Jeongguk bites his lip to hide his smile when she leans forward and rests her forehead on his chest while he squeezes out a line of toothpaste. He wets the brush a little under the tap, and then takes her chin like he had back in the club, lifting it up so that he can see her sleepy, downright adorable face. Seriously, who looks this cute after vomiting up their breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all of the vodka sloshed in between?

“Open your mouth,” Jeongguk says, moving his fingers so they can squeeze her cheeks and make her lips pout like a fish. His heart weeps like the pathetic thing that it is at the sight.

She waggles her eyebrows to the best of her ability in her sobering, exhausted state. “What’re you going to put in there?”

“Not my dick, unfortunately for you,” Jeongguk chuckles, holding up the toothbrush, and she sighs loudly with faux disappointment. Well, he thinks she is joking. Surely she is.

Obediently, she opens her mouth. Jeongguk abruptly shoves the toothbrush in there and starts scrubbing at her pearly whites before he can think of the way she looks with her lipstick-smudged lips parted so obscenely like that.

His brain is the epitome of a keyboard smash.

It only glitches all the more when Jeongguk gradually comes to realise the entire position that they are both in; taking him over like a virus. His non-brushing hand still cups her small jaw. Glitch. Her bare thighs brush against his hips as she lightly swings her feet. Glitch. She blatantly stares at him, eyes half-lidded and looking like melted butter. Error: Jeon Jeongguk is no longer computing.

At least he can thank all of the deities that she is no longer wearing the Cleavage Sweater of Jeongguk’s Absolute Demise. Otherwise, he would have a bird’s eye view of the goods in question, and he, undoubtedly, would be a dead man.

Before he can linger on the dangerous thought of her small breasts while he is at this high-risk proximity, she makes a distressed gurgling sound. A sliver of Jeongguk’s sanity returns to him and he realises that toothpaste is spilling out of her mouth and onto his hand. With a panicked yelp, he yanks the toothbrush out of her mouth and she hurries to swivel around and spit out the accumulated mass of minty foam into the sink.

“Jesus H. Christ, Jeon,” she rasps, coughing once and wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. Her glare is watery and suspicious. “Were you trying to drown me? Imagine that. Death by toothpaste.”

He sputters, swallowing down laughter. “Shit, sorry, I was just– Uh, thinking about something,” he mutters, sheepishly smiling and reaching around her to rinse off the toothbrush.

“‘bout what?” she hums, dipping her head down so she can cutely shove her face in his own. Jeongguk grunts and cranes his neck away, but she grins wider and follows him, accidentally bumping her nose against his jaw. “What’cha thinking about, huh?”

“Ugh, hey– Stop!” He lets the toothbrush clatter into the sink and smooshes her cheeks between his large palms, holding her still, approximately an inch away from his nose. Cautiously, Jeongguk leans back, redeems the blush that is steadily heating his own cheeks by saying, “I was just thinking about all the ways I’m going to make you repay me for making me deal with your drunk ass.”

She half-heartedly waggles her eyebrows. “Care to elaborate?”

“Oh, you know,” he says as he drops his hands to her knees, but he does not fucking know at all since he was thinking about her tits again. His barely functioning, overtired and exhausted brain manages to conjure a handful of weak options. “I could make you do the dishes for a whole month. Or maybe, I could get you to buy the groceries for the next two fortnights. That’ll wipe your cocktail debt, at least.”

“You’re too soft on me, Jeongguk. Even when I can make your life a living hell,” she sighs, sleepily blinking at him. Unexpectedly, she knots her hands into the front of his shirt and pulls him close, successfully bringing his face back to the proximity that it was only a moment ago; nearly nose to nose. He can very suddenly feel his pulse practically vibrating in his throat. “‘m really sorry. You deserve something better than just some silly chores. I’ll pay you back the money of course, but– … Hey, what does my breath smell like?”

Before Jeongguk can even question her, she is forcefully exhaling onto his face. A gust of peppermint fills his nostrils, powerful enough to make him flinch. “Minty fresh. Why?”

Her lips stretch into a gentle curve, and beneath the fluorescent lighting of the bathroom, it almost appears nervous. “Good, ‘cos here goes nothing.”

Jeongguk is about to frown, about to speak, about to something. He cannot recall. Not now that she has closed the short gap between them and is accurately planting her mouth upon his own.

For a moment, Jeongguk thinks he might well and truly be dreaming. That tonight was some ridiculously real, torturous fantasy that his imagination managed to conjure in his unconscious state. But then her soft, damp lips part ever so slightly. Warm with the heat of her mouth, yet cool from the toothpaste. She opens up to him, her hands sliding up his chest to lock around his nape, the tip of her tongue skimming along the rosy flesh of his lower lip, and he knows.

This is very, very real.

Holy shit.

It takes a second for him to comprehend that he should kiss her back instead of standing there like a startled creature. And so, he slides his hands up from her knees to the middle of her thighs, the soft flesh warm beneath his palms when he gently grips them, and he tilts his head slightly to the side to deepen it. At this, she makes the most pleasant, lovely little sound. The edges of her nails lightly graze against the hair on the back of his neck, and elicit gooseflesh that tingles along his arms. 

Jeongguk parts his lips, lets her in, groans quietly when her tongue brushes against the underside of his own and then recedes. He chases after it, tasting warmth and cool peppermint as he carefully sinks his teeth into her lower lip, nibbling at the plush flesh and releasing it. A thin string of saliva connects their mouths as they separate for the most infinitesimal of moments before they dive back in. They are abstrusely drawn to each other. Like a black hole has formed between their bodies and they are radiant stars, pulled to the centre by gravity, colliding and becoming one.

Jeongguk cannot think straight. His mind has become an unrecognisable labyrinth that he cannot navigate; sent into turmoil by the taste of her, the feeling of her underneath the weight of his hands. He searches higher up her thighs, skimming beneath the hem of the hoodie and over her boyshorts, finding her waist and anchoring his fingers there, pulling her closer. Now, with her torso melding against his own, she loops her arms over his shoulders and her legs around his hips, locking her ankles and hands so that the embrace cannot be broken. Jeongguk melts completely, and he prays that this is not just some measly, intoxicated repayment. That what he feels in the slow movements of her lips and the press of her tongue is what he thinks it is. 

What he has been hoping for all this time.

As if she reads his mind, she suddenly jolts away like she has been electrocuted. Jeongguk, startled and with his lips still parted, stares at her with awed, lovestruck eyes. She gazes back as though she is very, very unsure.

Oh no.

“Woah,” she breathes, then she is untwining her limbs from his broad figure and clasping her blushing face with something akin to embarrassment. Jeongguk would think it looks utterly adorable if the fear was not currently spiking his adrenaline. “Wow– That was– Oh. Geez. I’m so sorry–“

“Why are you apologising?” Jeongguk barely whispers, and he almost does not want to know the answer for the fear of her words shattering his feeble heart like a hammer taking to glass.

“I’m– What? I’m apologising because that– That was something I shouldn’t have done,” she stammers, then sighs, letting her hands fall into her lap and staring down at them. Jeongguk is frozen, his own palms still firm against her waist underneath the bunched up fleece. “It was out of line. We’re best friends. I mean, I could blame it on being drunk if I wanted to and we could forget all about it. But in all seriousness, I’ve wanted to do that for a while. It was a very sober decision–“

Jeongguk exhales, and it shudders reluctantly out of his lungs. “You’re not making sense.”

“Okay, fine, fuck it!” she suddenly shouts, and it makes him jump. Her voice echoes around the bathroom, and she looks up at him again, eyes overflowing with frightening determination.  “Jeongguk. I like you, okay? There. I said it. I like you so much, and I get that saying this might fuck up our entire friendship but I really like you–“

He cuts her off with his mouth on her own and thinks: How were we this blind for so long?

This time, the kiss is brief, yet urgent. A sense of desperation hides in the corners of their mouths. Not searching for an answer, but out of the sheer desire touch one another, breathe one another after being oblivious for so long. Jeongguk begins to laugh, soft chuckles against her mouth that draw mystified, hopeful giggles from her own chest. The kissing becomes quite pointless, for they are simply smiling so wide out of the absolute ridiculousness that they could have been doing this for months, maybe even years, at this stage. 

They were just too foolish and scared of losing the other. Yet none of that matters now.

“Is this you confessing back to me?” she mumbles, and there is so much delight dancing like starlight in her eyes that Jeongguk’s heart races. He pecks at her mouth once, twice, then moves to her cheeks, her nose, her forehead and her chin until she is laughing all over again and holy shit, Jeongguk is quite possibly too in love for somebody who was so firmly denying it no less than two hours ago.

“Something like that,” he hums, squeezing at her sides before slipping his hands out from underneath the hoodie so he can reach up and cup her face. There is something radiant bursting through his ribs. Most likely, his elated heart. “I think I love you. At this stage, for me at least, I feel like I love you. I thought I just loved you as a best friend, but it’s definitely more than that.”

“Oh thank god,” she grins, and he feels it against his palms. “I was going to say I love you instead of I like you, but I thought it might be too sudden and scare you away. So yeah, I love you too, asshole. Also, I’m still a bit tipsy.”

Jeongguk’s face feels as though it is going to split in half from smiling so hard. He tucks her hair behind her ears, dies a little on the inside at the fact that he can do that, and so much more, now that they have laid their cards on the table. Brushing his thumbs over her faintly blushing cheeks, he kisses her, and then says, “Really? Wanna go to bed?”

“Yes,” she sleepily nods, latching her limbs around him again like a starfish. “Onwards to my bed, O’ Noble Steed!”

“God. You’re ridiculous.”

“Ridiculously in love, bitch.”

“Wow, there’s the best friend that I know. Thought I lost you.”

“Nope. You fell in love with this, so you’re stuck with this.”

Grin still plastered to his face, Jeongguk hooks his hands underneath her thighs and lifts her up, delighting in the way she giggles with glee in his ear. In navigating out of the bathroom and to her bedroom, he carries her towards all the light switches so she can flick them off. He kisses her cheek with every single one. 

When they enter her bedroom, the overwhelming fragrance of her hits him like a shockwave. Even more so as he carefully lays her down on the bed and then tucks in behind her; the gentle, vanilla aroma lifting from the pillowcase. She rolls over to face him in the dark, and Jeongguk loops his arms around her waist so casually that anyone would think they have been doing this for years.

“Hey,” she whispers.

“Hi,” he murmurs back, pressing his lips to the centre of her brow. At this rate, he believes he may never stop kissing her now that he has started.

Languidly, she blinks, and then mumbles, “This is real, right? I didn’t black out on cocktails, did I? I’m not just having some crazy, amazing dream?”

“Definitely real,” Jeongguk chuckles, pulling her closer. She cranes her neck, angling upwards to catch his mouth against her own, still tasting faintly of mint and pure, unadulterated joy. He licks at her bottom lip, and she groans, pulling away.

“Don’t do that. You’ll make me more horny.”

Jeongguk’s dick, in an act of betrayal, begins to stand to attention for the nth time that night.

“Y-You’re horny right now?” He clears his throat, swallows saliva down his suddenly very parched windpipe.

“Yeah, ’cos I’m still a little drunk,” she whines cutely, but it is nearly lost on Jeongguk. Because now all he can imagine is peeling her out of his hoodie and the boyshorts, seeing her lovely and bare, and then making her cry out his name with every fluid thrust inside of her.

“Fuck, now I’m kinda horny,” he mutters, and she cackles evilly.

“Are you hard?”

“Half,” Jeongguk admits, and she shifts so that she is propped up on her side by her elbow.

“Can I touch you? I’m too tired to jack you off but– I just want to, y’know, feel it,” she is smirking through the shadows and Jeongguk cannot roll the yes off his tongue fast enough.

Then, her small hand is on his dick, almost immediately causing it to swell to its full, erect size.

Jeongguk releases a tight exhalation that whistles between his teeth, draws soothing patterns on her back with his fingertips to try calm himself from potentially blowing his load right here and now. He cannot believe that he has dreamed of this more times than he can physically count on both hands, and now it is actually happening. Out of fear of disturbing the moment, he keeps his muscles locked. She stays rather silent as she feels around him through his sweatpants; gently squeezing his shaft, his balls, her thumb gliding smoothly over the head. 

Then, she nods to herself. Her hand recedes, and Jeongguk feels the loss like a blade driving through his gut.

“I always thought it would be big after seeing your semi that one time, but this is quite impressive,” she very casually states while she lays back down, and Jeongguk’s heart stutters. He cannot decide whether it is torture or euphoria that he is experiencing right now. A concoction of the two, most likely, because 1. she thinks that he has a big dick, and yet 2. he refuses to drill it into her while she is still a few steps away from sober. He wants her head completely clear for that.

Instead, Jeongguk latches onto two of the words that she speaks, smirking himself as he says, “Always thought, huh?”

“Oh come on, you can’t say that you haven’t thought about my body, too!” she accuses good-naturedly, wriggling closer to him so that all of her curves and slopes press against him. His painfully hard dick nestles into her thigh. The desire to roll it against her spreads through him like wildfire. “I might’ve been drunker earlier, but don’t think I didn’t notice the way you were staring at my cleavage like a man deprived. That shirt is a godsend for my tiny titties, right?”

“God, you have no fucking idea,” Jeongguk shamelessly admits, burying his face into her neck and softly biting the flesh there, shivering when she squirms. She is better than he could have ever imagined in all of her reactions to his touches, the sounds that she creates. So real. “That’s why I told you to get changed. I thought I was going to die.”

She threads her fingers through his hair, softly stroking the dark locks. “I’ll make sure to wear it more often then.”

“Well, here’s your cautionary warning that I probably won’t be able to hold myself back when you do. I don’t care where we are or who sees.”

“That’s hot,” she laughs, and then yawns. Jeongguk untucks himself from the nook of her shoulder, licks his lips, and presses a firm kiss to her mouth. When she moves her thigh to wrap around his own, it brushes against the head of his hard cock and he has to swallow down a needy moan.

“Sleep. We’ll talk more tomorrow, okay?” He murmurs. “And we’ll fix this horniness problem. Also, side note: can I hold your ass?”

“Yup, go for it,” she hums, closing her eyes and resting her forehead against his own. Jeongguk smooths his palms down her spine and then over the supple flesh of her ass, and lord, it honestly feels as fantastic as he had expected. He gingerly gives it a squeeze, and she makes a soft, appreciative sound that has all the blood rushing out of his head, leaving him lightheaded and so fucking in love that it hurts. Well, hurts his dick, for the most part.

The room fills with placid silence, yet his heart thrums loudly in his ears, keeping him awake. He focuses on the way her breathing begins to even out, and tries to match his own to her pace. Slowly; in through the nose, out through the mouth. The minutes pass, and Jeongguk feels his body become heavier, heavier, until he closes in on the soothing edge of unconsciousness.

She stirs.

“Jeonggukie.”

“Mmm.”

“I think I’m going to vomit again.”

Jeongguk has been woken up in numerous unusual ways. Being punched in the face is a first, and is quite possibly one of the more painful methods. Even if it was an accident as a result of somebody flailing too close for comfort.

“Ow– Jesus!” He squawks, immediately rolling onto his back and cupping his nose where the fist had made sharp contact.

When he opens his watering eyes, he notices that his best friend is looming over him with a very confused and very concerned expression. The sight of her as the first thing he sees when he awakes is not abnormal, for she has proven to be a much more efficient alarm than his own cell phone on numerous occasions. Even if her method this time around was unnecessarily more painful.

But it is the fact that her bedroom surrounds the both of them that throws him off. Because that must mean he is sleeping in her bed. And why on Earth–

Oh.

That’s right. They confessed. They kissed. Jeongguk fell asleep with his hands on her beautiful ass after holding her hair back while she threw up a second time.

He pushes himself up on his elbows, a sleepy half-smile beginning to tilt his lips.

That is, until she very bluntly says, “What are you doing in my bed?”

The smile immediately vacates his expression, and he suddenly feels as though he has fallen off a cliff face and is plummeting through the air. Jeongguk’s voice trembles in the back of his throat as he quietly says, “What do you mean?”

“Why are you in my bed?” she questions him again, and Jeongguk thinks he is literally about to be sick. “Oh! That’s right. You came to the bar, didn’t you? Jesus. Did we get that drunk again that we ended up crashing in my bed together?” She shakes her head. “I bet it was like last time when we passed out in your bed after that frat party. You remember the one, right? Where we had a full-blown argument over pineapple on pizza–“

Jeongguk swiftly scrambles upright and out of the bed, his chest feeling tight in the worst possible way. Did he genuinely dream everything that occurred last night? Did none of it actually happen? Or was she drunker than he initially thought and she has completely forgotten everything that occurred?

“Don’t you remember, ___?” He whispers, and his voice cracks.

She tilts her head to the side. The sunlight filters through the bedroom window, casting her in a sheen of gold, and she looks so unbelievably, heart-wrenchingly gorgeous that Jeongguk feels something in his chest begin to splinter.

“Remember what?” she says, utterly clueless, and Jeongguk casts his eyes to the ground, confused and hurt beyond belief.

“Don’t worry,” he murmurs, starting towards the door. He cannot completely comprehend what is happening right now, but he knows that something is definitely off because he swears on his heart that it was not a dream. She was real. Her warm mouth shaped against his own was real. Her voice wrapping around the words ‘I love you’ was very, very real; he knows that he could never imagine such a confession so vividly–

Behind him, she bursts into a fit of laughter.

“Oh my god. Jeongguk, you’re more gullible than a dog running to fetch the ball that its owner pretended to throw!”

He whips his head around, eyes as wide as Jupiter. “W-What?”

“I remember what happened, dumbass. Everything. I kissed you in the bathroom, we confessed our undying feelings for one another, I touched your dick, yadda yadda.” She crawls across the bed until she is kneeling before him, carefully reaching up to clasp his face between her palms and Jeongguk is torn between wanting to beat her with a pillow or kiss her senseless. Huh, he supposes this is what angry sex must be all about. “Was I really that convincing?”

He closes his eyes, furrows his brow. His mind is still suffering from the sudden whiplash, and is now doused in liquid fury. “I’m honestly going to fucking kill you.”

“I love you too,” she placates him, rising up to tentatively kiss him. He cuttingly stares at her half-lidded gaze as she dusts tiny pecks to his unmoving lips until he finally caves through the simmering anger and gives in to her, flicking his tongue out to meet her own. Carefully, as if she is unsure whether he will tear her head off or not at the slightest misjudgement, she begins to travel her mouth down his jaw, mumbling, “I’m sorry, that was mean of me.”

“I genuinely thought for a moment there that I must’ve had the wildest lucid dream,” he mutters, settling his hands on her ribs and angling his head to the side so that she has easier access. “But I feel like I could’ve never imagined the sight, nor stench of regurgitated cheesy ramyeon with such disgustingly intense clarity.”

She chuckles, quietly apologising again, and the exhalation of it on his skin raises the hairs on his nape. She reaches the under of his jawline, plush lips coming into contact with an especially sensitive spot on his neck, and an involuntary moan escapes him when the light suck of her teeth sends shivers down his spine.

Jeongguk can feel the curve of her languid, wicked grin instantly forming against his skin.

“Instead of fucking killing me, how about you fuck me to my grave?” she suggests, and her tone is too saccharine around such filthy words. Unbearable enough to bolster his morning wood to its full capacity, even when the flame of rage from her awful joke is still dying out.

“You’re insane,” Jeongguk chuckles despite himself, and she leans back, divine smile still intact.

“Insanely horny after keeping my sexual frustrations for you locked up in my body for roughly a year now? Yes,” she confirms with finger guns and a wink. He shakes his head out of incredulity. “And, I do believe I have a dick to blow to say thank you for last night. And also to say sorry for scaring you just now.”

“Baby, I don’t think you realise this yet but if we’re really a thing now, then you’re going to be sucking my dick for a whole month to pay me back for the past twelve hours.” Jeongguk sighs, running his hand through his hair and then down his face. His heart soars from the way her expression meekly transforms at the sudden nickname. “I’m going to have to start a fucking tally.”

“Well,” she hums, slips her fingers into the waistband of his sweatpants, and Jeongguk becomes lightheaded, “consider this strike number one, baby.”

The way she says it melts him down like candle wax, and he cannot help but tackle her onto the bed, grinning at her surprised squeal that is soon suffocated by his lips. Jeongguk knows that they have all morning for this. That he can take his time to explore her body in all of its magnificence until he can perfectly map it out in his mind, can understand the raw shape of her, what glorious noises she makes when he touches her, and what specific places on her being elicit them. He mouths his way down her throat, catches the blissful sigh as it releases from her lungs into the early morning, and then detaches so he can sit back and look at her, straddled beneath him.

Jeongguk entwines her hands with his own and slowly draws them above her head. She simpers, her half-lidded, glassy eyes flooded with unadulterated desire, cast in golden sunlight that makes her appear unbelievably ethereal. He slides his palms to her wrists, leans down so that his lips hover just above her own, gazes right at her and thanks his lucky stars for gracing him with an embodiment of themselves in the form of a girl so radiant that she blinded him; enough, that he could not recognise the love cooped up in her eyes until she spoke it.

He murmurs, “___, I’ve loved you for as long as I can remember. Even if you destroy my savings account and eat the most repulsive meal known to humankind. You’re my best friend, and I want to escalate our best friendship to ‘best-friends-who-fuck-each-other-and-are-ridiculously-in-love’. What do you think?”

“Well, I love you too,” she smiles, her eyes flicking between his own, a glint of mischief hiding underneath the flutter of her eyelashes. “And I completely approve of such an upgrade. Partly because I cannot even express how long I’ve wanted to hold your hand and tell the world that you’re my boyfriend, and partly because I really want to blow you while you play video games.”

There, the realisation drives straight through Jeongguk’s heart. And his dick.

Ah, silver lining.

Note | I just wanted to write about Jeongguk’s phone vibrating against his balls. That is all. I have also never played Overwatch, so if any of the references are incorrect, I apologise. Thank you all for reading, liking, and reblogging this fun and silly little piece. I would love to hear your thoughts on it! ♡

“This is the truest of crimes, you know.”

The air is bone cold. Ice crackles and pops beneath the two wooden wheels of the cart. Breath steams in puffs of white at his lips. 

But she is vibrant. Blood against the white backdrop of snow that sticks to the soil, tucks between the frostbitten bark, and drips from icicles clinging to dead branches like daggers threatening to fall. Thick scarlet flows in the cotton of her red riding hood coat. Jeongguk pales beside her frame that nestles into his hulking side, a black mass of fur trim that tickles the cut of his jaw; wraps in grimy leather boots around his calves; shimmers in the onyx metal of the shotgun resting against his thigh.

Often, it is difficult to remember who is the monster. The cardinal or the crow.

“What is?” Jeongguk hums, tries to act indifferent but he knows she sees right through that facade now. Like mist clinging to the glass of a windowpane, her warm palms had effortlessly wiped the condensation away weeks ago, and he just as easily allowed her to. It is almost as though he wanted it, for her to peer in and take a look, to see that his insides are just as black as his plumage.

The handcuffs jingle when she lifts her wrists into view, leans into him. She feels warm against his arm, tempting. “These little darlings. Enchanted with a binding spell that I knew how to perform by the age of ten. You claim to hunt my kind, yet you need us to do so in the first place.”

“Touché.”

It is true, the hunters need them, those malevolent, selfish witches with their wicked fingers and tongues, as evil to their own kind as they are to all but themselves. Anything to have the upper hand, the benefit, the promise of another hundred years to crease the skin of their knuckles with lines of the cast; the making, the destroying. Fight blood with blood, they say. But she, the little bird that Jeongguk found whistling a sweet tune between evergreen trees, chasing a sickly rabbit to have in a stew, to ground the bones for later magic, never fit into that mould. Not an inkling suggested that her voice has ever crafted an incantation that’s seared villages down to the ashes, pulled a human apart limb for limb and eaten their heart from the inside out, poisoned a lake that supplies fresh water for the three towns within a fifty mile radius.

He still does not know, after all, what she did to land here beside him on this winding, snowy road in the middle of here and there. Handcuffed, wrists raw from the biting metal, trembling around her soft voice that chirps every now and then to the man that will claim the bounty on her head. A couple ten thousand. Not the biggest that the hunter circle has known, yet the largest sum he will ever stuff into his own, dirtied pockets.

“It’s getting dark, will we make it?” Her lips pout, brow daintily pinching. A pretty little thing, she is. Probably a murderer, too. All the ones that look like sugar and cream have thick tar running through their veins, pumping out of their heart.

But Jeongguk bets she tastes as sweet as cherry pie and has thought such a thing since five weeks ago when she willingly offered her hands to the jaws of the cuffs. All the way up until this very day.

“No, we’ll have to set up camp in the woods,” Jeongguk mutters with blatant distaste, eyeing the withered horses that seem to stride slower as the sun descends at a steady pace behind the thick blanket of overcast. The present threat of the darkening evening lugs at their hooves, weighs down at the tips of his own lashes in an unwelcome lethargy that has him pulling their reigns, guiding them off the path; neither too near to the tracks where a wandering by crook can steal his loot, nor too far that they completely lose the way.

She shrinks closer to his body now, looking absolutely unsure with her wide, fawn-like eyes, nervous as the horses tiredly wind them through the stark naked trees. Her teeth cling to her swollen lower lip again, and Jeongguk wants to hold her rubescent cheekbones between his grubby fingertips and kiss her silly. A dangerous, dangerous thought.

“Is the big bad witch afraid of the wilderness?” Jeongguk hums instead, admittedly satisfied at the way she tucks her stocking-covered knees into the side of his thigh, melding ever so near, handcuffs tinkling like fairy music; a sharp reminder ringing through his hearing of who she is, why she is here.

“I just–“ And she shivers, the kind that ripples from your toes to your nose and rattles your teeth in its trek– “Hate, hate, hate the cold.”

“We’ll build a fire,” Jeongguk chuckles, knows of at least three other ways he can keep her warm though retains those thoughts, tightly sealed underneath his tongue, “or we’ll try, at least. Might be too wet.”

She grumbles under her breath while Jeongguk pulls tight on the reins, the horses snorting and huffing white mist as they come to a standstill in a small clearing of white space, surrounded by the stark silhouettes of tree trunks. Effortlessly, he swings off the cart like a swooping crow and tends to the two black beauties, unhinging the pole between them, numb fingers fiddling over the buckles and leather straps of the breast collars, traces, and bridles; soothing them under his breath all the while, palms gentle on their smooth, midnight coats. The air is colder on his lips by the time he is releasing them from the weight of the cart, carefully lowering the front onto the snow-covered ground. Though his hands slip at the last fifteen or so centimetres and it suddenly thumps down. His ears perk up at the tinkling of chains, the panicked shriek and scuffled scramble as the witch struggles to keep upright on the seat.

“You’re still up there?” Jeongguk frowns, to which she lifts up her shackled wrists and stares levelly at him, encouraging him to roll his eyes. “You could’ve jumped down.”

“I’m cold, weak, and bound,” she huffs, gaze trained on him as he strides around to her side of the cart, “so it didn’t seem like that fantastic of an idea to test out. I don’t want a face full of snow.”

“No, we most certainly don’t want the imprisoned witch to suffer,” and although the sarcasm is laced lethally through his tone, Jeongguk stretches his long arms out to her anyway. Dark, strong muscles that look like reaching shadows amongst all the white. “Come here.”

Wetly sniffing, she shuffles close until his hands can wrap around her red waist, thumbs pressing into her bottommost ribs and thinking how simply he could crush them when he lifts her up and out of the cart. Once her laced boots are touching the ground, she stumbles a little and Jeongguk balances her with a hand on her shoulder, staring at her pinched and pretty features until she looks up at him, curiosity piqued, and only then does he break away. Jeongguk crosses the open space to near the looming trees and misses her murmured “thank you” when it drifts quietly after him.

Beneath his palms, the bark of each tree is soggy and sodden with melted snow. Jeongguk lolls his head back with a tired groan, and the sky is truly dark now, some of the brighter stars managing to dimly flicker through the sheet of grey clouds.

“No luck?” She calls, and Jeongguk tilts his body just so, enough that he can see her wearily eyeing the horses that hang their heads low, nudging one another.

“Completely saturated.”

“Well, I have an idea, but I don’t think you’ll like it.”

Jeongguk stiffens at that, something terrible striking through his heart and he struggles to keep his face composed, biting down on the twisted hope that tries to leak into his voice, “What might that be?”

She lifts up her wrists as she had done so in the cart no more than a few moments ago, exhibiting that same, level stare that manages to pierce through him, even when they are metres apart. “I can make a fire if you unchain me.”

The laughter that barks out of his throat is sharp, piercing; disbelief and disappointment mixed tightly together into the harsh, grating sound. Of course, of course. How could he think it would be anything other than that? A fool, Jeongguk, a complete and utter fool. Still, he watches her, the way her features remain unchanging, deadly serious and stoic, not giving anything away. Just like that, he falters, considers.

It takes seven steps to reach her, to loom above that tiny frame like the shadows that slink and play around the clearing. Even so, she is more dangerous than he ever could be. The crow may be the predator, but the cardinal is just as cunning.

“Can I trust you?” Jeongguk narrows his eyes, scrutinising her, though she upkeeps her calm play.

“No, of course not,” she’s honest at least, unusual for a witch, “but the risk is up to you. We either freeze over and die just like that, or you can have a little faith and let me build us a fire.”

The ideas circle through his mind again, the other ways to keep warm. He wonders what her skin feels like, if it is soft and plump, hot to the touch. But it seems to be a concept that will be fruitless to tease out of her, witches never being too easy to tempt. And so, for the sake of another day to survive, he rifles around his coat pocket until he pulls out the silver key.

Her eyes do not even zone in on the metal, the means of her release, remaining to keep on Jeongguk’s face and such a matter convinces him all the more that perhaps, it will be okay.

Jeongguk takes her left wrist, bringing it up so that he can fit the key into the cuff there, jostling the binds about until the teeth snag on the latch and the shackles unhook, gape open enough for her hands to easily slip out. His gaze does not leave her own as he stuffs the handcuffs and the key back into his coat pocket, proceeding to fold his arms and raise a thick eyebrow, hoping she is convinced by the brave facade that he stretches and moulds around the thin anxiety clinging to his form.

She sighs. He startles.

“Can you please take some bark from the trees? Just a few handfuls, doesn’t matter if they’re wet,” the witch skirts around him, gingerly rubbing her raw wrists, gaze flicking across the snow that she steps through. Her boot prints are dainty compared to the stomps of his own that press deeper into the white. When she notices that Jeongguk has not moved, nor said a thing, she looks back over her shoulder. A bloodstain beautifully marring the gradient of black to white. “Please?”

“Oh,” he shakes his head, thinks about the sleek onyx of his shotgun, shakes his head again, “yeah, I’ll do that.”

They both work in silence, with Jeongguk peeling and the witch still observing the ground that she treads. He has one armful by the time that she is crouched down, eyeing a spot at the centre of the small clearing, the fingertips of her right hand intermittently clawing at the snow in between shaking the ice from her nails, hissing and cursing under her breath because of the cold. Jeongguk keeps a distance of three feet from her small, hunched form, watching her dig and dig until she reaches the frozen dirt underneath, to which she elicits a pleased sound.

“May I borrow your knife?” She speaks without looking at him, a tiny palm splayed out just beside his boot where the hilt of the blade barely juts out. He wonders if she has noticed it nestled there since the day he chained her up, if maybe she plotted using it against him like this.

“As long as you don’t gut me,” Jeongguk says lightly, but the joke is no joke, and they both know it as he reaches down and pulls it from the strap, carefully twisting the blade in his hand and offering her the hilt.

It is only then that she finally flits her gaze up to him, doe eyes watching widely with amusement, swallowing him whole.

“If I had wanted to kill you, I would’ve done so the moment you unchained me. No, even before that, I would’ve snapped these shackles myself,” and he looks so alarmed that she laughs, a song caught in the still, chilly air. “Like I said, I’ve known this spell since I was ten. Sure, magic is harder to undo than it is to create, though it’s not impossible. Besides, if I really wanted to use that knife against you, then instead of asking you, I would’ve casted an incantation that charms you into handing it over to me without you even realising. You would only notice once the hilt is sticking out of your heart.”

She takes the knife from him then and, instead of driving it into his calf like he thought she might, she starts hacking it into the snow, breaking the frost apart to reach the soil underneath.

The cardinal is an enigma. Jeongguk, scared relatively shitless, knows that one fact for certain.

“Why aren’t you trying to escape? Nor attempting to kill me?” He cannot help but ask, a mountain of questions piled high in his throat, demanding to be spoken while she continues to scrape away the snow.

Her grin is tiny, soft and wicked, like the fact that he says “attempting” is hilariously sweet, to think that he even has a chance against the likes of her. “I’m not escaping because I deserve this awful end. I’ve lived a handful many decades, and I’ve done terrible things that merit a dismal way out. My time to die has come. Maybe a little earlier than I expected, though it happens to the best of us.”

Jeongguk wants to ask more, wishes to pick apart her bones and search the marrow for the answers, more truths, to learn of the genuine honesty about herself and who she is. But whatever he wishes to say becomes lodged in his mouth when he watches her bring the blade to her palm and cut a clean slice through the flesh. Crimson that looks like liquid black beneath the moonless sky instantly bubbles to the surface and spills into the clear patch of dirt that the very same knife carved out.

“W-What are you doing?!” He panics, which the witch has found among her years is a common reaction to the sight of blood, the very essence of mortality. She finds it rather ironic how blood is considered bad because the only way it can come into visual perception is through injury; meaning harm and danger and death. Thus, it is only safe and okay when it is trickling through veins and arteries, out of sight and mind.

The witch stays quiet and calm, dropping the now tarnished blade to the snow and dipping her fingertips into the sticky, red mess accumulating in her other palm. They come away dripping, soaked in the colour of her very own coat, and Jeongguk observes with his lips parted, shoulders rigid while she draws nonsensical script into the frozen surface of the dirt she has cleared. Witch language, looking twisted and evil, like it is going to reach out and bite him if he dares to look away.

“Blood magic,” Jeongguk finally whispers, completely baffled.

Her laugh is melodic, soft, accompanied by the frost that forms on her breath as she continues to write. “Did you think all of this red was simply for show?”

The corners of his lips would quirk towards the darkened sky if he were still not so surprised. “I thought it may have just been your favourite colour. It suits you.”

“So does your smile. It makes you less intimidating.”

Jeongguk cannot tell whether she might be joking, for she is quite possibly the most frightening thing that this forest will ever see. His threatening presence is infinitesimal in comparison to her own.

The inscription is seemingly complete when she lifts her hand away from the intricate cursive, looking back up to Jeongguk with a beckon of her dirt-and-blood-caked hand, following with a point of her forefinger to the exposed soil.

“Drop those on here,” she requests of him, and albeit slightly hesitant, Jeongguk gradually closes the distance and kneels down beside her, the cold seeping through his thick pants as he arranges the bark into a misshapen pile over the nearly invisible crimson marks. She beams at him, a curve of white that sparkles between her lips and causes his heart to race before she faces the beginnings of a fire and squeezes the rest of the blood from her wounded palm atop the already damp pieces of tree.

Jeongguk watches her press the gash against the snow, wiping away the remnants of crimson, and only a moment later does he realise she is whispering rapidly beneath her breath. A spell that loops and winds through the quiet clearing, frosts white at her lips until suddenly, with a cracking sound like a snapping branch, the bark ignites in a burst of well-needed warmth. Candescent orange licks along the dead bits of tree, sizzling when the tongues of flame venture too near to their snowy confines.

“There, we won’t be dying by the hands of the cold tonight,” she says, though Jeongguk hardly notices her soft voice in the clearing with his eyes peeled on the sight of the gash on her palm slowly healing itself. A sinister sense of danger thrums heavy in his chest, fingers itching to reach for the icy metal of the shotgun and level the barrel at her heart, yet he snaps his gaze towards the kneeling witch when her lips part a second time. The smile she wears is too tender; cast with warmth by the flames.

“Pull the rear of the cart to the edge of the fire and we can use the bed as a seat instead of the snow. That way, our coats won’t get wet and we’ll stay warm.”

Jeongguk wordlessly, ludicrously, abides by the word of his prisoner. He lugs the cart away from the horses and turns it so that its bed faces the fire and the witch, albeit with a fight from the snow getting caught in the old wheels. The flames reside close to the edge of the bedding, though, with the cold wetness that has seeped into the wood of the cart’s structure, there is hardly a single chance that it would catch alight. Obviously pleased with this turn of events, of having a flickering fire and a relatively dry space to lay, the witch claps her hands rather sweetly, wincing a little and pouting over the sharp sting at the impact made with her wound.

Jeongguk carefully skirts around the cart so he can sit on the edge of the bed; a bundle of darkness huddling into itself. He inclines his chin towards her hand and says, “Isn’t it painful cutting yourself to perform magic?”

“Not anymore, though it hurt like hell when I was just a kid,” the witch inspects her palm, the puckered gash that no longer bleeds. “But back then, I only did magic that required a small amount, only pinpricks to fingertips. I can control how much blood comes out, so I could’ve made the inscription for the fire with just a slice the size of a paper cut, but it would’ve taken much longer. The bigger the wound, the faster the magic.” She presses a handful of snow to the freshly sealed cut, holding it tight between her palms, cocking her head as she looks up at Jeongguk. “Also, didn’t you know I was a blood witch?”

“Not a clue,” Jeongguk looks away as the confession slips from his lips, sheepishly rubbing a hand at the nape of his neck. Out of the corner of his eye, her expression appears genuinely baffled, staring at him with saucer-wide eyes before returning her focus to the fire.

“Isn’t all of that information already provided to you before you hunt? So you know what you’re facing?”

Jeongguk scowls at the way in which she adjusts the alight bark, her fingers dipping into the fire without a care, coming out unscathed, a black ash that dusts her knuckles being the only evidence of the contact. “No. Your papers were untouched, save for the sum of your bounty. There was not even a smudge of ink to suggest what your abilities were, what you had done to earn such a penalty. That’s why I took you on when nobody else would. There’s always a fear when it comes to chasing the unknown.”

She ceases toying with the fire and swoops to her feet with airy elegance. “But you’re not afraid?”

“Everyone’s afraid, that’s natural human instinct,” Jeongguk says with a shrug, making space for her on the edge of the cart. The witch sidles up to him much like she had before sundown, packed into the heat of his side, and Jeongguk oddly, suddenly, feels warmer all over. “But the unknown tends to be the worst of them all. If everyone is too frightened to face it, then it will come for them just as quick.”

“You have a brave heart,” she smiles, teeth like pearls, “if I was worse off, I’d eat it.”

The itch to leap for his shotgun on the front seat of the cart nags at him once more. He is unsure whether it is the fact that he knows he will not reach it in time before she retaliates, or if he truly feels no impending desire to use the weapon against her, but instead, he says, “And being executed isn’t something you consider as ‘worse off’?”

The whites of her teeth slip away, hiding behind the firm line of her soft lips. “No. In this world, it’s quite possibly one of the better ways to die. Dishonourable for a witch, of course, since we take pride in letting our own magic do the bidding.” She picks at a fingernail, swings her small, booted feet. “I’ll burn at the stake, won’t I? I hope they scatter my ashes deep in the forest. It would be nice to rule there.”

“To rule?”

“They always take the ashes far from the town they burn the witches in, don’t they?” She asks, looking up at him once more for confirmation. Jeongguk nods at the tiny bloodstain that she is. “That’s because even when we are burned, our magic still thrives, albeit in a weaker state than when we die naturally by our own magic. You see, our bodies are merely vessels for the magic, and our souls are integrated with it. Once our magic and soul is without a body, they will accommodate the particular vicinity that the body last existed. The range of this vicinity depends upon the strength of the witch and how greatly she fostered her magic throughout her lifetime. So, if they were to leave the greater portion of the witches’ ashes within the town, the magic and the souls would combine and inhabit it, and it would be safe to say that the townsfolk would be absolutely doomed with all the magical beings and monsters that would spring up there.

“Also, different terrains host different types of magical beings. Imps and old demons dwell within forests inhabited by magic, though my magic would be strong enough to birth a talking tree and a dragon to protect the forest, too,” she says as casually as one would when figuring out what they are going to purchase from the market. Jeongguk feels rather stunned into silence, wide eyes blinking at her, absorbing all of the information that she speaks like water on parchment paper. Her sweet smile returns as she says, “That is why I hope to be scattered within a forest. It would be nice to rule one, don’t you think?”

He nods dumbly, brow knitted at the centre, and then asks, “It’s true then? The stories of the forest in the far East homing an albino two-headed dragon?”

“Yes, and it is an exceptionally powerful one, at that. The witch, Aenwyn, died by her own magic there. That is perhaps why it is more favourable for the humankind to burn us down to ash and decimate a great intensity of our magic with it, since the vicinities in which a witch’s magic inhabits when she dies is much, much stronger if she dies the way that we are supposed to. Aenwyn was over five-hundred years old, and she had lived within that forest for at least three-hundred of those years. A witch can tell when her time is up, so Aenwyn grew a tree around her body and let the magic eat her up, then the magic spread through the tree’s roots, which extend to all ends of that forest.”

The little witch traces her palm where the gash was buried. The skin is no longer raw and scarred; pearly smooth like it was before she had taken to it with the blade. She looks up at Jeongguk again, hooking her chin on his shoulder and looping her crimson arm around the midnight black of his own.

A foreign heat simmers underneath his skin, burning the frostbitten skin of his nose and cheeks all the brighter, especially when she softly says, “Not even fire could burn that forest down. Nothing other than a witch that is beyond stronger than Aenwyn would be able to eradicate it, and even then, that witch would die and the land that the forest stood upon would become a cursed site for demons to rule with the extreme levels of magic living in its soil. Luckily, Aenwyn was a kind witch, so there is no need for her forest to be destroyed, even if the humankind believe otherwise because of the two-headed dragon. They can be kind too, you know.”

At that, Jeongguk cracks, a breathy chuckle escaping him and she curiously watches him all the while. He notices her small hand resting upon his wrist and, without thinking, he takes it between both of his own, running a thumb over the bony knuckles. Beside him, her expression transforms, teeth sunk into the still swollen flesh of her lower lip. Jeongguk knows this is terribly wrong, touching her like this, feeling something come alive within his chest at the thought of having the witch he is sentencing to death for his own financial benefit tucked closer against him. A small furnace of warmth.

She tilts her head slightly to the side and asks, “What’s so funny?”

“Dragons and witches being kind, that’s the complete opposite of what I’ve been taught my entire life,” Jeongguk hums, staring at her hand clasped within his own. He sighs deeply, white mist gathering at his lips and dissipating almost immediately, and then settles his eyes upon her, watching the lambency melt into her skin. “Are you cold? Would you like to lay down? There’s sheepskin in the trunk.”

“Please,” she urges, teeth beginning to chatter now that she is no longer caught up in her own ramblings of forests and curses and the ashes that she is soon to become.

The cart creaks and wheezes as Jeongguk shifts so that he can reach the trunk strapped on the opposite end. He notices with an irritated groan that the locks are frozen over, so he grabs the shotgun from where it sits on the bench and busts the ice by slamming the stock against the metal, effectively shattering them. The sheer sight of the grey sheepskin inside warms him, and he gleefully pulls out the two rugs, each of which are certainly big enough to cover at least three people. The little witch must notice this, her soft voice piping up from behind him.

“Let’s lay one on the cart and then use the other as a blanket.”

Jeongguk, looking over his shoulder at her, hopes that the flush sitting high in his cheeks will be mistaken as the biting cold. “Are you sure? You don’t want one to yourself?”

She shrugs, and the dark may be hanging low in the clearing, unassisted by the fire that backlights her frame and melds her expression into a shadow. But Jeongguk swears that she is acting coy when she says, “We’ll be warmer if we lay together, anyway.”

“Are you trying to seduce me so that I won’t see it coming when you kill me?”

The witch laughs, tinkling sweetly in the air, and she crawls up the cart so that she is sat beside him. Here, he can see her pretty smile; glimmering something absolutely wicked. Jeongguk finds that he hardly cares. Jeongguk has somewhat always wanted to know if poison tastes like sugar.

“That’s a secret!” She giggles, and then helps him lay the grey mass onto the damp wood. Her voice is light when she winks and says, “Don’t worry, I’ll make it painless.”

He should take those words as a threat; loaded like the shotgun resting atop the closed trunk. Each word a bullet that’s just waiting to be driven through his heart. Instead, he lays on his side and wraps one half of the remaining sheepskin around his bulking frame and then watches silently, wide-eyed, as the witch begins to unhook the large buttons of her blood-red coat. The red riding hood image peels slowly from her figure, inch by inch.

The cardinal sheds. Revealing that, underneath, she was a crow all along. Just like him.

Jeongguk takes in her attire. Pitch black and skintight. Thick thermals that stretch from her throat to her wrists, all the way down to her booted feet; thighs and biceps and waist banded with belts and straps inscribed by witch language. Outlining the curves and dips of her figure like a dream. The orange light of the flames dances against her right side, melting into the onyx fabric, and Jeongguk only realises she is staring at him expectantly when she clears her throat.

“A-Aren’t you going to be cold?” Jeongguk stutters, trying to tame the thoughts that skip wildly through his mind. Nonetheless, he lifts up the sheepskin with his arm, welcoming the witch inside.

“I’ll be fine, you’ll keep me warm,” she hums nonchalantly, sliding between the rugs. Jeongguk can feel his pulse in the back of his throat as those words fill the air, expand in the clearing, and envelope him whole as she melds her small body to his own. Frozen, dumbfounded, all he can do is stare at her until she huffs and yanks his still hovering arm down so that the sheepskin embraces them and, similarly, he embraces her.

“See? Warm,” she grins up from where she is tucked into his chest, and Jeongguk, a man who is supposed to be a ferocious witch hunter with blood money wedged in his pockets, cannot help but soften into a dangerous, vulnerable state and smile back at her. When she notices the curve of his cracked pink lips, she snuggles in closer, the heat of her breath lingering on his chin when she whispers, “I wasn’t lying when I said your smile suits you. It’s like daylight breaching the horizon at dawn.”

Jeongguk shudders, neither a sensation of discomfort or pleasure. His body, under her insistent gaze, just cannot help but quake. “I’d stop there, if I were you. You’re making it hard for me to resist a prisoner.”

“That’s good,” she giggles, and Jeongguk, curling both of his arms tightly around her, feels the gentle vibrations of her bird-like ribs; humming a delicate song. Her hands that are crushed between their bodies emerge, the fingertips resting gently against his throat. “You can kiss me, if you like. It’ll pass the–“

If Jeongguk were asked to describe it, he would say he was incapable of doing so. Two opposite poles colliding; a wave crashing onto the shoreline; the sky passionately meeting the distant horizon. Perhaps, a deathly dehydrated man finding water for the first time in weeks; plunging himself into the cool mass, inhaling it into his stomach and lungs until his deprivation is satiated. Kissing her feels this way, like a force smashing into chaotic harmony with another. Satisfying a yearning that’s magnitude is only completely understood in all of its fantastic intensity when Jeongguk slices the tongue of her sentence and instead, presses his own to the soft seam of her lips.

She is pleasant; unbearably so. He elicits the tiniest, almost imperceptible sounds from her, like plucking a harp. Slanting his mouth slightly to the right, and she whimpers. Tracing the plush flesh of her lips with the tip of his tongue, and she sighs. Pushing it past her teeth to meet with her own, simmering when they touch, and she gasps. The witch coils around him, locking their legs together, urging him closer with her hands snaking around to his nape, and Jeongguk untucks her long-sleeve from the belt, slips his calloused, cold hands underneath the thick black fabric and slides them from the small of her back up to her shoulder blades. Her entire figure trembles, starting from her toes and climbing northward. Jeongguk no longer strums a harp; he holds an earthquake that splits down the centre, spilling open.

Unexpectedly, she pulls away. Jeongguk opens his eyes, hazy at first, blinking until her bright face comes into view and he can see the saliva glistening on her swollen lips. She seems to be about to speak, though Jeongguk cannot help but kiss her again; brief, enough to taste the chilly air already settling in the spit. The witch smiles when he draws back and brushes their cold, reddened noses against one another.

“I don’t know your name,” she mumbles, sounding almost embarrassed. Jeongguk presses his lips to her own in a swift peck, scattering more to her cheeks where the winter draws chilly patterns on her skin.

“Jeongguk,” he murmurs at the centre of her brow, gliding his mouth down the slope of her nose, then to her lips again; a magnetic pull that he cannot resist. Jeongguk smiles there, pearly whites curving against the damp pink, and she places a kiss on his teeth. “And you?”

“___,” the witch grins, her abdomen bowing delightfully into his groin as she fits herself closer. “I like your name. Jeongguk. Je-on-gguk. It’s nice.”

“It’s nice when you say it,” he agrees, drawing his hands still underneath the fabric of her shirt to settle on her small waist, massaging there. “So is yours. ___. Pretty, like you.”

“It’s pretty when you say it,” she mimics around a mouthful of laughter. Jeongguk, deciding that poison tastes like cherries and blood, catches her lips with his own once more, taking the lower between his teeth and sucking the sweetness from it.

“Tell me what you did, ___,” he suddenly murmurs into the corner of her mouth. The touch of her fingertips leaves his neck and instead comes up to his face, searing against his cheek; burning through to the bone. “I want to know. No, I need to know why I’m sending you to your death.”

The midnight dances across her eyes, almost appearing sinister if not for the way her lips are tilted in the stretch of a small, sad smile. One that, although faint, holds the weight of a past cast in thick shadows; jagged claws hiding between the floorboards; monsters looming in the corners, waiting to strike.

“No, we witches are too selfish, I cannot tell you,” she whispers, and the words are razors that slice as they fall upon his lips. But Jeongguk still licks the wounds with care, watches as her gaze washes over with a placid calm. “But it’s bad enough to be burned at the stake. You would be strung up beside me too if they knew about this.”

But all Jeongguk can do is grin, the hard exterior cracking completely. Always for her; the monster disguised. He tucks her head underneath his chin, holding her close, so near. The warmth of her breath is a gentle constant against his throat.

Jeon Jeongguk probably deserves death for living in such sin, and he is a fool to believe that he will have anything else coming for him.

“Sometimes, I think that might not be so bad,” he whispers, eyes closing and at long last giving in to the lethargy that has wound tight through his muscles since midday. Tucked in the nook of his shoulder, her smile is one of glass.

The witch of scarlet with a pitch black past burns silently at the stake within four days of the cold, cold night at the centre of the forest, tightlipped with her eyes closed as the flames blister and lick her skin black and burn her bones into charcoal. She is so hauntingly quiet that nothing but the crackling of the fire fills the town square, sounding like breaking bones; dying magic; the carcasses of promises.

The bounty is never collected.

It takes them a while, most especially since they had such little information on the blood witch other than her potential whereabouts. But they do find him eventually when they are deep in the neighbouring forest to scatter her ashes. The hounds sniffing through the fresh layers of snow are the ones to discover the hunter first; looking an absolutely disgraceful sight, frozen over and drenched head to toe in blood, wrapped in mottled sheepskin. Not a speck of it is his own, and rather, it belongs to the two headless horses collapsed either side of his body. 

It was the heart failure that got him.

If she was still here to enunciate the tale, she would confess that it was pity. That the heart attack was so easy to twist out of him, suggesting nothing more than the fact that he was not going to live any longer than a month, anyway. Make that pity and selfishness. Pity, that he fell so in love with such a witch as blood to bone evil as her. Selfishness, that she did not wish for him to watch her die in the fire, nor did she wish to escape with him to a place far away, building something together, only to bear witness to his heart crumbling like cracked ice within a matter of weeks.

As the witch was swallowed by the rich, fiery tongues of vibrant orange and red, she could not help but find comfort in their blazing warmth as they twisted about her strung up figure. She imagined they were Jeongguk’s arms wound tightly around her on their final, frosty night together. Keeping her close, even after he had drifted asleep for the final time, even when she had never planned to succumb to such unconsciousness because she was too occupied with contemplating just how she was going to do it. That was, if she could do it.

So maybe the cardinal did quite love the crow after all.

Note | LET’S GET SPOOOOOOOOOOPPYYYYYY.

I have had this in the works since the middle of last year and it feels so good to finally have it polished off! This was originally going to be a part of my ATM drabble series, but I suppose it became long enough to deserve its own little post instead. Anyway, hooray for my first post since June and hooray for witches and Halloween!

Not much thought goes into the abandoned, neighbouring house on the hill.

Well, until the day Taehyung peers out of his kitchen window and sees the driveway that lays forty-five metres from his own, hosting a shabby car packed to the rafters. Clothing and household items and two women of the same genetics spill out of its doors.

A scowl molds his weary features. The lone cloud that is lazily passing by the sun—smothering its shine—startles and scurries across the early morning stretch of robin’s egg blue, allowing the giant star to douse the scene in its luminous rays. Light swathes the hill in a diaphanous sheet of gold. Now, Taehyung sees clearly that it is certainly a mother and daughter who lift and load, tug and pass, in perfect tandem. Two birds filling their new nest.

It is quite a sight, really, for it is barely eight o’clock and they are both so utterly vivacious. On the other hand, Taehyung is bone tired, and it is most surely showing in the way that the sun lazily ascends, as though it perhaps has something else much better to do. Like staying in bed for another four hours.

Nonetheless, the candescent brilliance glowers at him through the crystalline pane, overlooking the sight of the first sign of human life that he has encountered in about a decade. Give or take.

You should go help them.

Taehyung agrees that it seems the polite thing to do. But before he has had the chance to have his taste buds graced by the heat of his freshly brewed cup of coffee? It could be a bad idea, especially since he is still frowning.

Though another god must be listening in on him, for the younger of the pair suddenly trips on her own feet and sends the contents of the cardboard box she carries flying across the gravel. Some items smash and splinter in a mess of china and glass, while others bounce against the ground and roll this way and that.

Taehyung is already bursting out of the front door, loping down the slope, praying that nobody had noticed the minuscule flare of the sun when the panic struck him like a bullet.

What he does not expect as he nears is for the girl to be coughing, doubled-over, palms pressed to her lips to smother the worst of it. Highly unlike the way that people will loudly expel tight air from their lungs to dislodge whatever infinitesimal particle is stuck to the back of their throat. Rather, she holds it in like she is hiding a secret; something that was never supposed to make itself known to the light of day. She swallows the sound as though she cannot bear for her mother, oblivious to the crash and the outcome inside of the house, to hear it.

Taehyung only understands when the girl calms down, straightens her spine, and her hands come away from her mouth smattered with scarlet.

“Are you alright?” he tentatively calls, five feet away, and she is damn near startled out of her wits, yanking her head around to face him.

The whiplash of how gorgeous she is, all bright eyes and radiant skin, gets him nearly as fierce as her surprised reaction of a shriek.

“Christ!” the girl yelps, licking her red lips and pulling the sleeves of her sweater over her knuckles, concealing the evidence. “What– Where did you come from? Who are you?!”

Taehyung, despite the fact that his heart knocks against his chest, grits his teeth. He should have had that coffee. “I’m your neighbour. That’s my house–” He helpfully gestures up the hill where his home resides, as if they are not the only two buildings within an eight kilometre radius– “Up there. I saw you trip over from my kitchen window and thought I’d come down to help you, but, uh, I guess I saw...”

With the tapering of his sentence, Taehyung’s gaze softens and drifts to her hidden away hands. He flicks his eyes back up to her expression, watching her sigh. Caught red-handed, quite literally.

Suddenly, he feels intrusive. Horribly rude, like he should have never stepped outside of his house in the first place and let his words run so bluntly across the space that separates them. Though such tar black feelings are quick to dissolve when the corners of her mouth curve with a hint of mirth.

“Oh. Well. I apologise,” she speaks gently, something high and beautiful and terrible like the blood stained on her hands. “But I suppose you know why we’re here now. I’m ___, by the way.”

“To spit blood on the hill’s face?” Taehyung, mentally slapping himself, thinks to trap his voice in a box for the remainder of eternity. He deserves Hell for the fact that his first human interaction in years stumps down to him joking about the disease that seeks home within this girl.

Yet her laugh, honey sweet, speaks forgiveness.

“For the fresher air, the warm sunlight.” The girl is radiant, in her words, her tone, absolutely everything. Blood still sticks to the left corner of her lips, yet she is so winsome that it hurts. “To breathe easy and live as content as can be.”

Then, her eyes flick worriedly towards the house; the open door where a mother is about to appear and question who the handsome stranger standing on her brand new front yard happens to be. “Just. Please, let’s keep this little mess between the both of us? My mother knows it’s bad, but she doesn’t know it’s become even worse. Promise?”

Measuredly, Taehyung slides his eyes from the doorway to the girl, staring at her honest, humble face like she is the prettiest possession of a museum. There is a tickle that dances across his lips, something of a smile, and he cannot help but notice the way her eyes widen a fraction. A string of panic is quick to tug at his chest when she does so, hoping to the heavens that he is not accidentally emitting luminesce from his pores. (It would not be the first time.)

“I understand,” he avows, mouth curving upwards as he scratches the back of his head and inclines his chin towards the almost forgotten mess. “My name is Taehyung. Shall we clean this up, ___?”

When she grins in full force at him before turning to the littered items, Taehyung cannot help but think that perhaps, whatever sun he has known and reigned over for the last millennium has been counterfeit. For the real one resides stolen in her smile.

Spring has not seen such extraordinary sunlight in years. Taehyung pulls it from every corner of his side of the world like summertime. They have not heard from the clouds in weeks, and he could not care less about the rotten complaints that the other sky deities spit at his feet.

This won’t last forever, comes the warning he expects. But Taehyung is ignorant; completely blinded by the devotion that spreads in poison ivy throughout his ribcage. All he can think about is the way that she had said the warm sunlight and how those simple words ignited a flame of brilliant determination within him.

Most days, they laze together in the luscious garden that circles Taehyung’s house in a barricade of ambrosia. They bathe in golden light, surrounded by soft pink peonies, blushing carnations, violet anemones; the score to the scenery being the gentle buzzing of bees and her occasional coughing. She never questions him on why he lives up here, how he survives so alone, nor how he can even afford it when he appears to be the same age as herself and has no apparent job to his name.

Instead, the girl stretches out across the neat, green grass. Instead, she pretends she does not notice the way her thin summer dress has hitched up her thighs and has his throat running dry. Instead, she tells Taehyung about the dreams she has when she slumbers forty-five metres from his own bed, and asks him questions that she deems important.

“Would you rather an extra nose, or an extra mouth?”

“If you could name a star, what would you call it?”

“Say I asked you to kiss me right now, would you?”

Four months pass, and the sunlight always stays. Brighter, if anything. Lasting later into the evening, now that summer has made way. She tells Taehyung it is the best she has breathed in years. That the clear, warm air tastes undeniably sweet in her lungs.

When he finally kisses her, he expects sugar and syrup and warmth. Not the taste of iron and salt and a guillotine just waiting to drop.

Taehyung has never wanted, nor needed to save somebody. All he has ever been required to do is bring the illumination to his side of the world. To fill the tenebrosity with handfuls of gold; to tuck light wherever it may fit.

But he has abused his rights, and that is perhaps why the gods are unforgiving at the moment he needs them most.

Her mother is in the town when the world falls to pieces like petals peeling from the receptacle of a withering bloom. Taehyung is the one to bear witness, to have his heart deteriorate alongside her lungs.

A rush, and the clouds flood the sky in a blanket of grey, almost as if they have been waiting for this dent of vulnerability to finally blow. They stream into the soft blue like depraved beasts to watch an end come to the girl who barred them for so long.

“Don’t,” she manages in a rasp, fingers weightless on his wrist, drawing the phone from his ear. “Please, Tae. This– It’s time...”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Taehyung is a wreck, his insides are shattered and his heart is pouring into his lap where he cradles her wheezing frame, utterly helpless. “You still– You can have more time–”

“I don’t–” She coughs, a harsh sound, flecks of crimson spraying onto his throat and collarbones. The tears roll fatter, faster down his cheeks. A sob is lodged in his chest. “I don’t w-want more time. I’m happy... For this t-to be it, Taehyung.”

All he can do is stare, blink furiously to be rid of the tears that smear his vision of her placid features. It had happened much like the day they met, with him observing through the kitchen window. Though this time, love was touching his eyes as he watched her add to the pile of blooms laying severed from their stems, next to where she had knelt in his garden. Above, the sun had watched and protected with its kindly, golden palms resting upon her bare shoulders, gliding its fingers through the flyaway hairs that curl at the nape of her neck.

She had started coughing. Taehyung had thought it would pass, that her feeble lungs would gradually relent as they always do, and he had went to fetch a handkerchief to clean up the aftermath. It was not until he had stepped out onto the grass and found her completely collapsed over the culled flowers that he had realised he never once thought they would give up entirely.

“Tell m-my mother... I’m sorry. That I love her.” Her eyes are glassy, her bones becoming dead weight against his arms. But the faint, tragic smile stained with her own blood remains. “I love you, Tae. So much.”

Something cracks inside of him, the salt waterfalls gush at a greater ferocity. Yet Taehyung is firm and sure when he stares into the eyes he fell so head over heels for and says, “I love you, ___. I will never stop loving you,” and she smiles at him like she is not resting on her deathbed.

“Make the sun shine...” her voice is barely above a whisper, exhaling thickly, lungs full of the scarlet that belongs to her veins and arteries, pumping through her slowing heart, “... one last time?”

The words ground him, tug his bearings back into sense and have his eyes staring widely into her own like the answer to her question hides somewhere within the shards of her iris. A ghost of her smile still draws at her ruby-stained lips. A truth unspoken. An acknowledgment that she made long, long ago, though never felt the desire to pry. Just like she ceased to do with the personal questions that she could have pulled from his bone marrow with her very own teeth if she tried.

Instead, she let him be, and loved him and the sun all the same.

Taehyung cannot bear to peel his eyes from her face, yet he must. Facing the sky, he focuses on the spot of brightness that is barely apparent through the coverage of thick grey.

I will take her. I will keep her safe. It is all that I can do.

Taehyung knows, and he accepts.

Before he squeezes his eyes closed and presses his lips to her forehead, Taehyung takes in her equable expression one last time. His trembling fingertips tuck her hair behind her ear in a gesture so heartbreakingly familiar that a tear gathers at the corner of her eye, passing down her cheek. With a careful lean, his mouth connects to her skin and she sighs, an utterance like relief, acceptance. The last sound that passes from her tender mouth.

In all of its glorious might, the sunlight suddenly bursts through the overcast in a radiance so effulgent, stories of its intense flare on this day carry through to the next millennium. Taehyung takes his lips from her skin to watch as her shining soul lifts from where her heart lays still. At first, it carefully treads, gradually climbing through the air.

Then, the sun gingerly reaches down to collect her.

It is not until months later, once he believes he has been wrung dry of all emotion, that Taehyung notices something different.

It comes the day after a mother has packed the items she and a daughter had unloaded into their nest, little over a year ago, to chug the shabby old car out of the driveway for the final time. Returning alone to the city that they had left together. Taehyung wakes early, drags his feet to the kitchen, and fills the stovetop kettle with water. Placing it over the glowing element, he pads towards the window, just as he does every single day. A routine to keep him sane.

But here, on this particular morning, he is met with a sight that nearly stops his heart.

The slowly ascending sun resembles her soul more than it ever has.

The voice is quick to follow, completely unlike he has ever known it. Yet holding a familiarity that has him grinning through the tears.

If you were able to name a star, would it be after my smile?

Prompt | Nurse Me: I’ll write a drabble about my character healing yours.

Series | Across The Multiverse is a collection of drabbles based around the prompts from this list, each taking place in a different universe. The updates will occur whenever I am inspired by a prompt to write a small piece, most generally done as a warm-up.

The castle has not moved in weeks, and the thought of it eats at your heart like the demon’s flames consume his own.

“We must go,” you say to the flickering orange and red, staring off into nonexistent space as though perhaps a door to another, safer world may magically appear out of thin air. “We must move farther away.”

“Yoongi wishes to stay, my dear girl,” the flames respond. The crackling voice is strained, exhausted. Your chest yearns so sorrowfully at the sound, the weakness of the fire meaning weakness of the wizard. “He knows what’s best. You’re the forefront of his thoughts, and he only wishes to protect you.”

Out there, somewhere, the faux protector is dying. Yoongi is letting his humanity become consumed by a self you have only seen thrice; meddling with old, bad magic as a being of wings and feather. To protect you, the fire that holds his heart insists. But Yoongi, of everything in this world, knows you would rather die together than alone. Than you with every single memory you both shared, and he, incapable of even remembering the feel of your name on his lips.

The old magic takes and takes, with little but war to give back.

Your eyes, at long last, refocus, and you notice that you have been staring at the unmoving front door the entire time. Reluctance weighs heavy on your shoulders when you drag your sight towards the fire before you, like the lock may suddenly become eternally latched shut if you dare not watch it for too long. 

“Do you know why he wishes to stay?”

“He’s tired of running from the truth. For you, he no longer desires to be a coward.” The fire’s voice is gentle, its flames warm. Though no comfort can seem to settle within your rigid bones; cannot melt them into soft butter anymore. “It’s all for you, my dear girl. He’s doing it all for you.”

Anger bubbles within you, a boiling pot threatening to spill over. You bite the inside of your cheek until it bleeds to drown the scream that nearly claws itself from your tongue. Because Min Yoongi, that selfish bastard of a wizard, does not deserve to enact such confident performances of bravery. 

Most especially if it means saving you.

The placid lake shimmers underneath golden radiance, yet you do not feel protected like you used to. The war is here, nobody, nor no place, is safe.

He made this meadow; blossomed the flora, created the endorheic basin. All for you. Everything, for you. But he cannot grant the sole wish that you desire. The easiest one of all.

It is a beautiful day. The meadow flowers sway in the gentle breeze—a kaleidoscope ocean of green, white and pink. Puffs of pearl glide through the seamless, pale blue sky. Behind you, the fire sits quietly in the castle that no longer moves, licking at a lover’s heart. Endlessly bored, but you understand.

The both of you are becoming restless. The wait is like an itch that never leaves. Scraping your nails over it only causes such minuscule, temporary relief before it flares back up again, riper than ever.

Months have passed. The war still rages on, evident by the fact that the doorway portals are being erased one by one. Kingsbury and Porthaven can no longer be visited, bombed, most likely, in the crusade between the humans and the wizards. With every loss, you sob at the lake’s feet, begging to its crystalline surface that it bring a ceasefire to this affray. You strip down to your bare skin and bones and wade out to its cold, aching centre and wonder if it is worth holding yourself under. Never to resurface.

Never to know whether the wizard made it.

And that, right there, is the thought that makes you glide back to the shore, tug on your undergarments, your dress, and pretend that you never once entered the body of water in the first place.

“Someone is coming.”

The fire startles you with those three words. Hot tea spills into the saucer rather than the cup, scalding your fingertips with a hiss from your lips.

The last time it said that was two weeks ago when a stray battleship had flown over the meadow, striking fear and concern within your chest. Yet the heart-eating fire had blended the unmoving castle into the grass as though it were one with the dancing field. Slowly, ever so slowly, the ship had passed through the murky sky with its bombs clutched to its belly, waiting to be released, to claim more souls than heaven can handle all at once.

This time, it is different. The fire demon had said “something” on that sickening day, and you swear that it just muttered–

“Someone?” You watch the flame with wide eyes, liquid burning your shaking fingertips. Tea drips onto the floorboards from between your knuckles, though you hardly notice over the way your heart lodges in your throat. “Did you just say–”

“Yes, my dear girl!” The fire sounds hopeful, so awfully hopeful. Its voice rises with a victorious crackle that shakes the walls of the drab castle and booms through your body. “It’s him! Alive! It’s Yoongi!”

The porcelain shatters, and you are running, bursting through the front door and tumbling into the midday light of the bright meadow like a bird taking flight from a tree. Wildly, you turn this way and that, eyes peeled to the sky, and you see him. You see him! There, coming down from the pale blue like a falling star, pitch black feathers peeling from his body and fluttering in a contrail behind him as his figure descends towards the lake’s surface.

No thought to remove your clothes is ever considered. Your calves burn as you sprint towards the edge of the water, boots and all coming with you. You have barely waded past your hips when Yoongi impacts with the glittering face, mere metres in front of you. Immediately, without sparing a moment to breathe, you dive down.

When you reach his body, laying in the shallows, it is the warmest thing you have known in months.

As you pull him from the lake’s arms and onto the grass, he is weightless. Even his saturated, simple clothes of a white blouse and black pants are light as air, like he is not even real. Lingering magic; becoming heavier with every last feather that is plucked from his arms by the water. The wings are gone by the time you fall to your knees beside him, choked sobs heaving from your lungs, and he is Yoongi. Min Yoongi. Your darling wizard Yoongi who only messes with old magic that turns him inhuman for the sake of protecting you.

“Yoongi,” you cry, palms cradling his warm face, staring into his calm expression, waiting for his closed eyes to flutter. So, so tired of waiting, and yet here you still remain. For him, always. “Please. Please, wake up.”

With one fell swoop, you lean down and press your mouth to his own, kissing the shimmering lake from his lips, drinking him in, indulging on the heat that he stores. The tears come harder when the rosy flesh parts underneath your delicate pressure, inviting you closer, awakening with a curl of his long, bony fingers around your wrist. With your eyes open, you notice the pinch of his black brows, the twitch of his eyelashes before they snap wide apart, brilliant irises staring up at you.

A sound comes from his chest that feels like relief, desire, home.

The hand releases from your wrist. His arms curl tightly around your waist, and Yoongi is suddenly looming over you, grinning like the end of the world was never about to occur.

“My love,” Yoongi’s voice is hoarse, but it is him. His lips fall upon your cheeks, your nose, your mouth; finding the under of your jaw, the column of your throat. You laugh and cry in his iron embrace. “My gorgeous love. I’m so sorry. I’m so terribly sorry.”

Then, the tears pour from his eyes with the weight of wars, of the dead, of the old magic that he knew for too long. The both of you, soaking wet, cry in the meadow that remains motionless, mouths finding any expanse of flesh available to help him rediscover the love that he nearly forgot.

The sun is perched upon the horizon by the time Yoongi gets to his knees, clothes now dry, and links his fingers with your own to bring you up with him. And it is there that you realise he was not the only one who almost forgot. For you could never precisely remember the feeling of Yoongi’s knuckles fitted perfectly between your own; the warmth that caresses your skin as you admire the home that the two of you built together; his lips touching to your temple before you both walk towards the front door.

For the first time in years, with the end of another war, the castle does as it is supposed to do.

It moves.

Prompt | Kiss: My character kisses yours, or vise versa.

Series | Across The Multiverse is a collection of drabbles based around the prompts from this list, each taking place in a different universe. The updates will occur whenever I am inspired by a prompt to write a small piece, most generally done as a warm-up.

The slow count, ten seconds and you are out.

It occurs just like that, in successions of ten. Ten long and hasty strides to reach the front door from the dingy elevator at the end of the hallway. Ten beats of bloody knuckles rapping against the wood, leaving smudges of red on the chipped paint and rousing the sleeper within. Ten displayed in a cyan one and zero on the minute side of the digital clock, with a number much less than that stating the early morning hour. 

The devil’s sequence no longer belongs to thrice mentions of six. Rather, it becomes three tens and one boy with his torn fists and bruised jaw and crimson teeth, backlit by a stale, flickering hallway light like a gruesome, illuminated angel in your doorway. A fierce contradiction that you refuse to swallow because, if anything, Kim Taehyung was pulled from the very roots of Hell.

“I thought I told you to not come back here,” the hiss comes lethargically from your lips. Your left hand fidgets on the brass handle so that the silence is filled with rattling, metal clicks.

Taehyung only smiles, gums still bleeding. His eyes hide beneath the brim of his baseball cap, and the hood of his black sweater is pulled over the top as a means of double-checked identity protection.

“Got nowhere else to go, doll,” he chuckles and coughs like such a lie can possibly convince you, crossing his arms and leaning a shoulder on the doorjamb. He is mindful to not brush his roughened knuckles against his sleeves. “You’re my only option.”

“Maybe that means it’s time for you to rot on the streets.” The words are unforgiving, and he expects it; takes it on the chin like a true boxer. You wonder when the day will come where he will start to listen. When you will truly mean it when you tell him to get the fuck off your property, and he will actually abide. “Don’t you think so, Kim?”

Taehyung does not have skeletons in his closet. He has ten dead men instead; bloody pulps that have marred his fists with angry pink scars and smears of scarlet. Ten death threats trained on the back of his head by a cocked trigger; a balled up fist coming from behind in the dark; your very own hands curled tight around his throat.

He is danger embodied, and he has your heart between his teeth.

Nudging up the bill of his cap, you can see the ugly purple bruise that curls around his right eye, the swelling already having calmed. It is horrifying how damn beautiful he looks all beaten, lilac flowers blooming gorgeously against his golden skin. The centre of his lower lip is split into a taste of iron and salt that is oftentimes warm against the tip of your tongue.

Taehyung stares measuredly, weighs up the imbalance of malice in your eyes. He proceeds to sigh.

“I knew that from the beginning,” he mutters, and then he walks right in as always. 

Closing the door with a haunting creak, you follow the devil into the dark.

You hate to associate the word ‘good’ or any of its synonyms with Kim Taehyung, but you will admit that he is a good boxer. Great, even.

He fights a mean game with the intent to harm balled up in his fists, blood-thirst acting as the driving force behind each swing. He could never do it with the proper protection: wearing gloves and padded helmets and following the rules of safety. He only gets a thrill from it when it is raw: skin heavily striking skin, skulls cracking, bones breaking. So, he started on the surface, worked his way into the underground, and brought professional knowledge into the illegal scene. He used the law to his advantage and started winning.

Always, always winning.

The only problem is that it is difficult to stop him once he starts, like he is knocked unconscious, but his body continues to move on its own will. The jabs become harder, fiercer, angrier. He strikes the perfect blow, the slow count begins, but he does not stop. Nobody can get him to either, not until the opponent is indistinguishable, soaked in red, rushed to the hospital and never making it.

Taehyung is good. So good that they want him dead to make even with the ten heads that he can tick off on all of his fingers.

The both of you would probably be better off that way.

“I’m going to start making you pay a quarter of the water bill, Kim.”

Taehyung, rubbing a towel through his damp hair, flicks off the bathroom light and becomes nothing but a silhouette among the shadows. “Are you, just?”

“If you keep having twenty-minute showers–” The mattress dips underneath new weight, the devil nears– “Then yes, I am.”

His voice is right above your face, and when the large hand finds your hip, you startle. The grin he wears is practically illuminated at that. “Fine by me.”

Bodies shift, discovering alternative comfort. Taehyung’s nose fits into the crook of your shoulder, cold with damp nostrils, his fingers splaying warmly over your stomach. Heat radiates into your spine from his scarred and bare chest, and you resist the urge to press closer, to fit yourself between his broad shoulders and drain every inch of warmth from his body until it belongs to your own.

“One day, doll, I promise,” Taehyung sleepily murmurs, lips moving with the words against your neck.

When you tilt your head back, you accidentally knock against his wounded eye socket, eliciting a wince and a groan that rumbles from the centre of his chest. You cannot find it in yourself to feel apologetic.

“Promise what?”

“That I’ll stop coming to you,” Taehyung’s mouth moves to the shell of your ear in time with his hand slipping higher underneath your shirt, gently gliding over your breast until his palm is pressing firmly over your heart. As it steadily thumps against his lifeline, he softly whispers, “I’ll stop putting you in danger.”

Nine times promised, the tenth still to come. But you both hope that day never arrives.

Prompt | Sleep: My character needs to stay at your character’s house for the night, or vise versa.

Series | Across The Multiverse is a collection of drabbles based around the prompts from this list, each taking place in a different universe. The updates will occur whenever I am inspired by a prompt to write a small piece, most generally done as a warm-up.

Pre-concert, there was no merch for sale, so I decided to go pretty late and there was practically no line at the doors when I arrived. By the time I was in my seat, there was only forty minutes left until the show started.

But going late was the best decision I ever made because I met a teenage boy and his parents on the train, and he was wearing a BTS hoodie so I struck up a conversation and we stuck together until we entered the stadium where I took him to his gate and gave him a big hug goodbye.

He was a Seokjin stan that had traveled over from New Zealand and his parents were so rad, but we didn’t even exchange names until I took him to his gate dhdjdk. We just bonded so much over BTS without having properly introduced each other.

I even almost told him my fake name (Ivory) instead of my real one for some wild reason, I think just out of habit. But to the young, sweet boy who I met before the concert, if you happen to be reading this... Keep that real name shit under wraps. It is classified!!!

Unfortunately, I did not see any of my wonderful readers before or after the concert, which sucks because I would have loved to have met you guys. When I think about it now, it might have been a good thing you didn’t because bOY WAS I SWEATY AND SMELLY WALKING OUT OF THAT ARENA.

When I sat down in my seat, I immediately turned to the girl behind me and asked if she was going to stand up during the concert because she best believe that I would be on my feet the entire time. But if she wasn’t going to stand, I wouldn’t either (I know I am short as heck but I didn’t want to block her view of the gods). Even though she said she would be standing, I ultimately spent most of the time sitting down until the last three songs.

The first stage was Fire and it was lit!!! I don’t think I have screamed so much in my life than in that moment!!!

They all did the introductions and the crowd was going wild every time a different member would come up on the screen, and Yoongi did his typical taking out of the earpiece to hear the screams and I swear my heart fell out of my ass at that.

I also swear to god the crowd was a bunch of Seokjin stans because he received such loud screams every time he came on screen, damn.

HE INTRODUCED HIMSELF AS “WORLDWIDE HANDSOME” I CAN’T.

Jimin’s pronunciation was so good? And clear?? I was amazed because all I had heard from social media posts was that he rarely speaks and such because he’s nervous about using English. But damn did that boy speak a lot with perfect fluency and it made me grin crazily wide.

I cannot really remember much of Taehyung’s and Hoseok’s intros because Tae did a really short and simple one, and Hobi did the same one that he usually does at all the shows.

Did they still melt my fucking heart? Yes.

The crowd was a bunch of Jeongguk stans too because wow, he got really loud screams as well every time his face was on the screen.

But you bet your ass I screamed loud as heck for all of them.

Now, the rest of the night was a giant blur and so I will go through the key points instead of every moment of the show detail for detail.

When they performed 21st Century Girl, Jeongguk momentarily rested his hand on Yoongi’s shoulder as he sang “everybody gonna love you bae” and the camera was on Yoongi at that point and he did this little grin and hid it behind his arm.

Yes, I am going to replay that Yoonkook moment in my head for the rest of eternity, I don’t care.

Yoongi said “It was… Legit” in one of the speaking moments and it received like a confused scream from the audience because it was a little difficult to understand what word he had said.

Namjoon then repeated it with a whole lot more clarity and he received a giant scream from everyone and Yoongi looked so shitty about it, only worsened when Namjoon teasingly pulled a face at him.

All of them kept saying “legit” after that incident for the rest of the night.

Taehyung was overly fascinated by the confetti. He left the boys at the centre of the stage at one point just to mehtodically collect a small handful from my side (left) of the stage, and I still, to this minute, have no idea what he did with that confetti or where he put it...

He also tried to eat it when it came falling from the ceiling, and the little bab kept fake crying every time there was any mention of having to leave. It made my heart weep.

Jimin did numerous harmonizations to his own vocals in the mash-up of their old songs, it was unbelievably good. He was also doing that growling, low vocal and I nearly passed the heck out.

During Cypher Pt.4, Yoongi wiped his sweat on a towel and threw it into the crowd and Hoseok threw his empty drink bottle into the crowd after drinking from it and spraying them with the contents.

Seokjin “gave” us his heart. AKA a red wristband on each wrist with hearts cut into them, and I swear to god I busted a lung laughing over it.

A fan threw the Australian flag at Jeongguk while he was not paying attention during the final goodbyes and it unintentionally landed right in his hands and he looked really surprised. He even placed his hand over his heart after he had put it down to express his shock and it was adorable dhjksdfg.

Hoseok was so smiley and happy the whole entire time, I honestly did not realise his smile could be ten thousand times as dazzling in person, but it is. He just had the greatest vibe and I found myself dancing in my seat every time my eyes would follow him.

That goes for all of them, I seriously underestimated other fans saying how they look even better in real life, but holy shit they do, they are gods.

I cannot even classify Kim Seokjin as a god. He is whatever is above a god in regards to attractiveness. If nothing exists after a god, then it is just him. The almighty handsome man.

Speaking of, I cried when he hit the high note in Awake. The stage was so gorgeous for his solo as well. My chest was swelling with an uncountable many emotions.

Namjoon tried to do an Australian accent, which was actually pretty decent, though he was all adorably shy and apologised because he thought he did it bad!! He even said how he someday would love to move to Australia and live here.

Watching Jeongguk do his dance for Begin honestly drove me to englightenment. I have been waiting for the moment... To see that choreography with my own eyeballs and in the flesh... For centuries...

I will deadass admit that my focus was on Min Yoongi all night. I never went in with that intention, but after looking through my videos and reflecting on my general memory of the night, he was all I could focus on whenever he was on stage. He seriously has such a presence, and fucking damn is he hot.

Taehyung, Yoongi and Seokjin really favoured my side (left) of the stage. And boy, do they stare! It honestly feels like they are looking right at you sometimes. Taehyung would often pick a point in the crowd and just stare directly at it for a solid ten seconds.

During Namjoon’s solo, he said something like: “Go with the flow/vibe.” Then he closed his eyes and started slowly jamming on his own, and the sole thought that went through my head was: “He looks so baked right now.”

I cannot express how phenomenal the cut scenes were that would come on while the boys would go off stage to their change outfits. The cinematography and editing was flawless. The message and purpose behind it all was exceptionally beautiful and touching. It makes me really excited to see where they will be taking their music next!

Lastly, the loudest and longest screams of the night went to Namjoon saying: “So, this concert is special because it’s our first one since the Billboard Music Awards.” Seriously, the whole crowd went wild with pride, and the looks on their faces when we did was just the greatest.